Close approach of Mars and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Mars and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°50' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:45 (PDT), 44° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:48.

Mars will be at mag 0.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 Mars and Saturn 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
Mars 12h58m00s 6°35'S Virgo 0.3 8"3
Saturn 13h02m50s 3°59'S Virgo 0.6 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 91° 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

4%

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

18 Jun 1982  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
12 Feb 1983  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
21 Apr 1983  –  Saturn at opposition
01 Jul 1983  –  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.

Share