Close approach of the Moon, Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Saturn and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 5°55' of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:08 (PDT), 56° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:51.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4; Saturn will be at mag -0.1; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. The trio will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 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
The Moon 07h40m10s 16°21'N Gemini -11.4 30'52"3
Saturn 07h54m10s 21°14'N Gemini -0.1 18"6
Mars 07h46m00s 22°59'N Gemini 1.3 5"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Sep 2025

The sky on 10 September 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

79%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:18 12:41 19:03
Venus 04:11 10:58 17:45
Moon 20:18 02:55 09:42
Mars 09:13 14:52 20:32
Jupiter 01:48 08:55 16:02
Saturn 19:38 01:33 07:29
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

20 Jan 1976  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
12 Dec 1977  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
18 Jan 1978  –  Mars at perigee
21 Jan 1978  –  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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