Close approach of Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 1°11' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:40 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 35° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:09.

Jupiter will be at mag -1.8; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Saturn 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
Jupiter 14h15m10s 12°21'S Virgo -1.8 32"0
Saturn 14h16m40s 11°14'S Virgo 0.5 16"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 50° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2025

The sky on 1 July 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Crescent

41%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:43 21:41
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:41
Moon 12:09 18:15 00:12
Mars 10:21 16:50 23:19
Jupiter 05:21 12:31 19:42
Saturn 00:22 06:21 12:20
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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