Close approach of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°42' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:26 (PDT) – 3 hours and 41 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:24.

Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 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 11h15m30s 4°33'N Leo -4.4 26"4
Mars 11h16m00s 6°15'N Leo 1.7 4"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jul 2025

The sky on 9 July 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:02


Waxing Gibbous

98%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:38 21:25
Venus 02:59 09:56 16:52
Moon 19:48 00:28 05:13
Mars 10:12 16:36 23:00
Jupiter 04:58 12:08 19:18
Saturn 23:51 05:50 11:49
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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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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