Close approach of the Moon, Mars and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Mars and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°27' of each other. The Moon will be 7 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:41 (PDT), 45° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:58.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9; Mars will be at mag 0.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 Mars 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 12h53m00s 0°02'N Virgo -11.9 30'40"1
Mars 12h44m40s 4°59'S Virgo 0.2 8"7
Saturn 13h02m50s 3°50'S Virgo 0.5 18"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 95° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Aug 2025

The sky on 24 August 2025
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:48


Waxing Crescent

5%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:56 11:46 18:37
Venus 03:41 10:41 17:42
Moon 07:43 14:03 20:15
Mars 09:27 15:19 21:10
Jupiter 02:41 09:49 16:57
Saturn 20:48 02:44 08:41
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

11 May 1982  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
05 Apr 1984  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
11 May 1984  –  Mars at opposition
19 May 1984  –  Mars at perigee

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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