Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 44.9 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 18:45 (PDT), 39° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 39 minutes after the Sun at 22:08.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8; Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Mars will be at mag 1.6. The trio will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 04h50m00s 26°09'N Taurus -10.8 32'44"5
Venus 04h53m00s 26°29'N Taurus -4.4 26"8
Mars 04h56m20s 23°44'N Taurus 1.6 4"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jun 2025

The sky on 8 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

96%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:21 13:39 20:56
Venus 03:16 09:46 16:16
Moon 18:08 23:07 04:01
Mars 10:49 17:32 00:15
Jupiter 06:28 13:39 20:50
Saturn 01:50 07:48 13:46
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

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19 Sep 1973  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
16 Oct 1973  –  Mars at perigee
24 Oct 1973  –  Mars at opposition

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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