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°02' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:56 (PDT), 13° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 52 minutes after the Sun at 21:09.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0; and Mars will be at mag 1.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 02h32m50s 14°03'N Aries -2.0 32"7
Mars 02h31m30s 15°02'N Aries 1.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2025

The sky on 30 June 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56


Waxing Crescent

36%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 14:43 21:42
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:40
Moon 11:11 17:34 23:48
Mars 10:22 16:52 23:22
Jupiter 05:24 12:34 19:45
Saturn 00:26 06:25 12:24
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

20 Dec 1999  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
29 Sep 2000  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
27 Nov 2000  –  Jupiter at opposition
25 Jan 2001  –  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.

Share