Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°46' of each other. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:57, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:58, 48° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:02, 29° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; Jupiter will be at mag -2.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.3. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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

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 Jupiter 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 13h25m10s 12°28'S Virgo -12.6 32'53"2
Jupiter 13h20m10s 6°50'S Virgo -2.3 41"1
Saturn 13h35m40s 7°05'S Virgo 0.3 18"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 133° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Sep 2025

The sky on 10 September 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:30
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

85%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:18 12:41 19:03
Venus 04:11 10:58 17:45
Moon 20:18 02:55 09:42
Mars 09:13 14:52 20:32
Jupiter 01:48 08:55 16:02
Saturn 19:38 01:33 07:29
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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