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

Close approach of Venus, Saturn and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus, Saturn and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 3°42' of each other.

From San Diego , the trio will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 13° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:18 (PDT) – 1 hour and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:25.

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

Venus will be at mag -4.5; Saturn will be at mag 1.0; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. 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 Venus and Saturn 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
Venus 23h52m50s 0°48'N Pisces -4.5 37"6
Saturn 23h53m10s 2°54'S Pisces 1.0 16"0
Neptune 00h04m20s 0°54'S Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Apr 2025

The sky on 28 April 2025
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:32

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:01 11:10 17:18
Venus 04:08 10:13 16:18
Moon 06:23 13:39 21:04
Mars 11:47 18:47 01:48
Jupiter 08:33 15:39 22:44
Saturn 04:18 10:14 16:09
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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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