Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 5°28' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:22 (PDT), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 17 minutes after the Sun at 22:22.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in Sextans; Venus will be at mag -4.1 in Leo; and Mars will be at mag 1.3 in Leo.

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

At around the same time, the trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 10h19m00s 5°58'N Sextans -10.5 32'56"3
Venus 10h28m10s 10°56'N Leo -4.1 17"1
Mars 10h30m40s 10°32'N Leo 1.3 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2025

The sky on 6 July 2025
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00


Waxing Gibbous

89%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:42 21:33
Venus 03:00 09:54 16:48
Moon 16:58 21:49 02:37
Mars 10:16 16:41 23:07
Jupiter 05:06 12:17 19:27
Saturn 00:03 06:02 12:01
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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17 Dec 2010  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
08 Jan 2011  –  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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