Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 9.0 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:32, when they reach an altitude of 20° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:46, 77° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:56, 21° above your western horizon.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.6; and Uranus will be at mag 5.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible 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 Jupiter and Uranus 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
Jupiter 07h55m10s 21°12'N Gemini -2.6 45"1
Uranus 07h55m20s 21°21'N Gemini 5.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 169° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius 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.

Related news

03 Nov 1954  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
16 Jan 1955  –  Uranus at opposition
01 Apr 1955  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
08 Nov 1955  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion

Image credit

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

Share