Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Mercury will make a close approach, passing within 4°41' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:19 (PST) – 1 hour and 50 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:53.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3; Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Mercury will be at mag -0.2. The trio will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h52m10s 22°14'S Capricornus -10.3 31'30"8
Venus 20h45m40s 17°48'S Capricornus -4.0 14"2
Mercury 20h36m20s 20°06'S Capricornus -0.2 5"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Dec 2025

The sky on 25 December 2025
Sunrise
06:53
Sunset
16:48
Twilight ends
18:18
Twilight begins
05:23


Waxing Crescent

36%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:49 10:46 15:43
Venus 06:44 11:38 16:32
Moon 10:43 16:27 22:18
Mars 07:14 12:07 17:00
Jupiter 18:03 01:09 08:16
Saturn 11:27 17:19 23:12
All times shown in PST.

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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