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

Conjunction of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Saturn and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 34' to the south of Mars.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Northridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:59 (PDT), 21° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 42 minutes after the Sun at 22:51.

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Saturn will be at mag 0.2, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Saturn and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Saturn 08h45m00s 18°50'N Cancer 0.2 16"8
Mars 08h45m00s 19°24'N Cancer 1.8 4"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Sep 2025

The sky on 2 September 2025
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
19:18
Twilight ends
20:45
Twilight begins
04:58

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

80%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:16 18:55
Venus 03:58 10:52 17:47
Moon 16:23 21:03 01:46
Mars 09:21 15:06 20:52
Jupiter 02:15 09:23 16:30
Saturn 20:13 02:09 08:05
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

05 Apr 2006  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
05 Dec 2006  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
10 Feb 2007  –  Saturn at opposition
19 Apr 2007  –  Saturn 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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Northridge

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34.23°N
118.54°W
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