Conjunction of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 41' to the north of Mars.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:55 (PDT), 20° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 33 minutes after the Sun at 22:39.

Saturn will be at mag 0.6, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Saturn 10h31m10s 11°06'N Leo 0.6 16"6
Mars 10h31m10s 10°24'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 Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

77%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
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

02 May 2008  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
31 Dec 2008  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
08 Mar 2009  –  Saturn at opposition
16 May 2009  –  Saturn 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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