Close approach of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Mars and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 57.6 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:16 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 48° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:29.

Mars will be at mag 1.4; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. 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 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 Mars 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
Mars 11h41m20s 3°52'N Virgo 1.4 5"2
Uranus 11h40m00s 2°58'N Virgo 5.5 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Sep 2025

The sky on 22 September 2025
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
18:48
Twilight ends
20:12
Twilight begins
05:13


Waxing Crescent

1%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 13:12 19:09
Venus 04:34 11:08 17:41
Moon 07:29 13:22 19:06
Mars 09:04 14:35 20:07
Jupiter 01:10 08:16 15:21
Saturn 18:48 00:43 06:37
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

23 May 1966  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
29 Dec 1966  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
13 Mar 1967  –  Uranus at opposition
28 May 1967  –  Uranus ends 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