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

Close approach of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°35' of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:35, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:08, 57° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:35, 52° above your south-western horizon.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.2; and Mars will be at mag 0.4. Both objects 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 pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mars 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 10h48m50s 8°40'N Leo -2.2 38"0
Mars 10h50m50s 10°11'N Leo 0.4 8"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 102° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:46

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:57 11:32 18:08
Venus 03:50 10:01 16:12
Moon 18:24 23:36 04:39
Mars 11:12 18:28 01:43
Jupiter 07:36 15:07 22:38
Saturn 03:41 09:36 15:30
All times shown in EDT.

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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26 Dec 1979  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
24 Feb 1980  –  Jupiter at opposition
26 Apr 1980  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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