Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°00' of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:39 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 55° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:33.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7; Jupiter will be at mag -2.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 Jupiter 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 12h15m50s 1°29'S Virgo -11.7 31'27"9
Jupiter 12h17m50s 0°36'S Virgo -2.0 34"7
Uranus 12h16m20s 0°58'S Virgo 5.5 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 78° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus 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

92%

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.

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23 May 1969  –  Jupiter 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.

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