Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 2°48' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:24 (PDT), 30° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 52 minutes after the Sun at 22:58.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h29m50s 24°17'N Cancer -10.5 31'16"1
Venus 08h25m30s 21°38'N Cancer -4.2 20"9
Jupiter 08h25m10s 19°52'N Cancer -1.9 32"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

72%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
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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