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 2°25' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:17 (PDT), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 16 minutes after the Sun at 22:16.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Mars will be at mag 1.2. The trio will lie in the constellation Leo.

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

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 11h00m50s 9°41'N Leo -10.4 29'51"7
Venus 10h56m30s 7°31'N Leo -4.2 19"6
Mars 10h54m20s 7°59'N Leo 1.2 5"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Aug 2025

The sky on 22 August 2025
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
20:59
Twilight begins
04:46


Waning Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 11:42 18:34
Venus 03:37 10:39 17:41
Moon 05:39 12:35 19:22
Mars 09:28 15:22 21:15
Jupiter 02:47 09:55 17:03
Saturn 20:56 02:53 08:50
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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