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 and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 3°58' of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:16 (EDT), 38° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 52 minutes after the Sun at 22:51.

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Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 Venus and Jupiter 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
Venus 03h01m00s 20°25'N Aries -4.4 24"3
Jupiter 03h07m20s 16°43'N Aries -2.1 34"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2025

The sky on 4 April 2025
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:51
Twilight begins
04:41

6-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

53%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:38 11:38 17:39
Venus 05:06 11:25 17:44
Moon 10:39 18:50 02:54
Mars 11:59 19:37 03:16
Jupiter 09:18 16:50 00:23
Saturn 05:46 11:34 17:23
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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09 Feb 2037  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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