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
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°36' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:06 (PDT), 35° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 26 minutes after the Sun at 23:15.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. The trio will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h39m40s 24°07'N Gemini -10.6 32'56"2
Venus 06h41m00s 25°43'N Gemini -4.2 17"9
Mars 06h41m00s 24°53'N Gemini 1.3 5"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jul 2025

The sky on 16 July 2025
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:44
Twilight begins
04:08

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

63%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:38 14:19 20:59
Venus 03:00 10:01 17:01
Moon 23:16 05:26 11:46
Mars 10:05 16:24 22:43
Jupiter 04:37 11:47 18:57
Saturn 23:24 05:23 11:21
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.

Related news

16 May 1991  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
13 Jun 1991  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
28 Oct 1991  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
01 Nov 1991  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

Image credit

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

Share

South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

Color scheme