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 1°04' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:51 (PDT), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:01.

Mars will be at mag 1.5; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 07h29m40s 23°24'N Gemini 1.5 4"7
Uranus 07h29m00s 22°20'N Gemini 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 57° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Aug 2025

The sky on 15 August 2025
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
19:38
Twilight ends
21:09
Twilight begins
04:39


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 11:42 18:33
Venus 03:26 10:31 17:36
Moon 22:51 05:54 13:06
Mars 09:35 15:33 21:31
Jupiter 03:08 10:17 17:25
Saturn 21:24 03:22 09:19
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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01 Apr 2039  –  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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