Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 3°24' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 17:29 (PDT), 37° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 40 minutes after the Sun at 20:52.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8; Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Mars will be at mag 1.1. The trio will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 trio will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

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

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h00m10s 3°20'S Aquarius -10.8 32'53"9
Venus 23h04m30s 6°34'S Aquarius -4.3 21"0
Mars 23h06m50s 6°31'S Aquarius 1.1 4"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Sep 2025

The sky on 9 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Gibbous

90%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 12:38 19:02
Venus 04:10 10:57 17:45
Moon 19:48 02:05 08:32
Mars 09:13 14:54 20:34
Jupiter 01:52 08:58 16:05
Saturn 19:42 01:37 07:33
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.

Related news

09 Jun 1952  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
23 May 1954  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
24 Jun 1954  –  Mars at opposition
02 Jul 1954  –  Mars at perigee

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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