Close approach of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 35.4 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:49 (PDT) – 3 hours and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:57.

Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Saturn will be at mag 0.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 12h47m30s 3°19'S Virgo -4.4 22"6
Saturn 12h48m20s 2°45'S Virgo 0.7 16"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Sep 2025

The sky on 12 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:27
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Gibbous

64%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 12:47 19:05
Venus 04:15 11:00 17:44
Moon 21:29 04:44 12:09
Mars 09:11 14:49 20:28
Jupiter 01:42 08:49 15:55
Saturn 19:30 01:25 07:20
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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