Close approach of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°54' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 18:34 (PDT), 58° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:24.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.2; and Mars will be at mag 1.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 03h52m30s 19°35'N Taurus -2.2 36"2
Mars 03h50m50s 21°27'N Taurus 1.1 5"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Jul 2025

The sky on 22 July 2025
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
04:14


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 13:51 20:28
Venus 03:02 10:06 17:10
Moon 03:22 11:02 18:40
Mars 09:58 16:13 22:28
Jupiter 04:19 11:29 18:39
Saturn 23:00 04:59 10:58
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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28 Oct 1989  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
27 Dec 1989  –  Jupiter at opposition
24 Feb 1990  –  Jupiter 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.

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