Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 22.6 arcminutes of each other.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:35 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 36° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:57.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 07h37m20s 21°37'N Gemini -2.0 33"6
Uranus 07h37m30s 21°59'N Gemini 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 May 2025

The sky on 1 May 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
04:46


Waxing Crescent

26%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:41 11:56 18:11
Venus 04:45 10:51 16:58
Moon 09:25 17:27 01:25
Mars 12:07 19:25 02:42
Jupiter 08:47 16:13 23:39
Saturn 04:53 10:47 16:40
All times shown in EDT.

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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