Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 19.0 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:06 (PDT) – 1 hour and 9 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:59.

Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or 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 Venus and Jupiter 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
Venus 09h10m10s 17°14'N Cancer -3.9 10"1
Jupiter 09h09m50s 16°56'N Cancer -1.8 30"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Leo 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.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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