Close approach of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Mars and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 55.5 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dusk.

Mars will be at mag 1.7; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h53m30s 24°10'N Gemini 1.7 4"1
Uranus 06h53m10s 23°15'N Gemini 5.7 3"6

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

The sky on 5 Oct 2025

The sky on 5 October 2025
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
18:30
Twilight ends
19:53
Twilight begins
05:23


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:05 13:37 19:08
Venus 05:00 11:17 17:34
Moon 17:46 23:52 06:09
Mars 08:55 14:18 19:40
Jupiter 00:26 07:31 14:37
Saturn 17:51 23:44 05:37
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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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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