Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 5°15' of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:34 (PDT) – 3 hours and 7 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 33° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:23.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1; Jupiter will be at mag -2.1; and Mars will be at mag 0.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 00h35m00s 8°10'N Pisces -11.1 29'47"4
Jupiter 00h46m40s 3°48'N Pisces -2.1 33"5
Mars 00h42m40s 2°47'N Pisces 0.7 6"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 62° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2025

The sky on 8 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Gibbous

96%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 12:34 19:01
Venus 04:08 10:56 17:45
Moon 19:19 01:16 07:22
Mars 09:14 14:55 20:37
Jupiter 01:55 09:01 16:08
Saturn 19:46 01:42 07:37
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

25 Nov 1973  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 1975  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Dec 1975  –  Mars at perigee
15 Dec 1975  –  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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