Close approach of Venus, Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Venus, Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 4°56' of each other.

From Northridge , the trio will become visible at around 18:47 (PDT), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 21:59.

Venus will be at mag -4.3; Saturn will be at mag -0.0; and Mars will be at mag 1.4. The trio will lie in the constellation Taurus.

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 Venus and Saturn 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
Venus 04h02m50s 24°03'N Taurus -4.3 23"1
Saturn 04h08m10s 19°16'N Taurus -0.0 17"0
Mars 04h05m50s 21°53'N Taurus 1.4 4"7

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

The sky on 2 Sep 2025

The sky on 2 September 2025
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
19:18
Twilight ends
20:45
Twilight begins
04:58


Waxing Gibbous

80%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:16 18:55
Venus 03:58 10:52 17:47
Moon 16:23 21:03 01:46
Mars 09:21 15:06 20:52
Jupiter 02:15 09:23 16:30
Saturn 20:13 02:09 08:05
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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13 Feb 1973  –  Saturn 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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