Close approach of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°15' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:10 (PST), 46° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:08.

Saturn will be at mag -0.1; and Mars will be at mag 1.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and Mars 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
Saturn 06h02m00s 22°43'N Gemini -0.1 17"5
Mars 06h02m10s 24°58'N Gemini 1.4 4"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 59° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Nov 2025

The sky on 5 November 2025
Sunrise
06:13
Sunset
16:55
Twilight ends
18:20
Twilight begins
04:47


Waning Gibbous

98%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:09 13:02 17:56
Venus 05:01 10:38 16:14
Moon 16:16 --:-- 06:23
Mars 07:40 12:44 17:47
Jupiter 21:34 04:38 11:42
Saturn 14:44 20:35 02:27
All times shown in PST.

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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06 Jan 1975  –  Saturn at opposition
14 Mar 1975  –  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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