The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°01' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:59 (PDT) – 1 hour and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:34.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.2; Venus will be at mag -4.5; and Mars will be at mag 1.1. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h47m40s 6°13'N Pisces -10.2 29'50"2
Venus 00h48m20s 5°13'N Pisces -4.5 37"1
Mars 00h50m20s 4°07'N Pisces 1.1 4"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Sep 2025

The sky on 4 September 2025
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:39
Twilight begins
04:58

12-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

90%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 12:21 18:56
Venus 04:00 10:52 17:45
Moon 17:45 22:48 03:57
Mars 09:17 15:01 20:45
Jupiter 02:07 09:14 16:21
Saturn 20:03 01:58 07:54
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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18 Jan 1978  –  Mars at perigee
21 Jan 1978  –  Mars at opposition

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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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