Close approach of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 37.8 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:52 (PDT) – 1 hour and 56 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:08.

Venus will be at mag -4.5; and Mars will be at mag 1.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus 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
Venus 01h00m40s 5°42'N Pisces -4.5 34"2
Mars 01h03m00s 5°29'N Pisces 1.1 4"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Sep 2025

The sky on 6 September 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:36
Twilight begins
05:00


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 12:28 18:59
Venus 04:04 10:54 17:45
Moon 18:50 00:27 06:14
Mars 09:16 14:58 20:41
Jupiter 02:01 09:08 16:15
Saturn 19:54 01:50 07:46
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.

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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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