Close approach of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Mars and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 45.0 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:47 (PDT), 39° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:24.

Mars will be at mag 0.4; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible 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 Uranus 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 21h36m20s 15°48'S Capricornus 0.4 7"5
Uranus 21h35m10s 15°06'S Capricornus 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius 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

99%

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.

Related news

30 Oct 2001  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
02 Jun 2002  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 2002  –  Uranus at opposition
03 Nov 2002  –  Uranus 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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