Close approach of the Moon, Venus, Uranus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus, Uranus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 4°34' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the quartet will become visible at around 17:01 (PDT), 22° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 46 minutes after the Sun at 19:30.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3; Venus will be at mag -4.1; Uranus will be at mag 5.8; and Neptune will be at mag 8.0. The quartet will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 quartet will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the quartet at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 19h11m20s 20°09'S Sagittarius -10.3 30'14"4
Venus 19h15m40s 24°37'S Sagittarius -4.1 15"6
Uranus 19h08m40s 22°54'S Sagittarius 5.8 3"4
Neptune 19h14m20s 21°38'S Sagittarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The quartet will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2025

The sky on 2 July 2025
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Gibbous

57%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:43 21:40
Venus 03:01 09:52 16:42
Moon 13:05 18:54 00:36
Mars 10:20 16:48 23:17
Jupiter 05:18 12:29 19:39
Saturn 00:19 06:17 12:16
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

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19 Jan 1993  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
05 Feb 1993  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
10 Jun 1993  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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