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 a mere 13.5 arcminutes of each other.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:06 (EDT) – 3 hours and 32 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 40° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:22.

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Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 11h37m40s 3°18'N Virgo -4.3 20"7
Jupiter 11h38m00s 3°31'N Virgo -1.8 31"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 6 May 2025

The sky on 6 May 2025
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:36
Twilight begins
05:07

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

77%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:40 11:58 18:16
Venus 04:33 10:39 16:45
Moon 15:04 21:31 03:50
Mars 12:17 19:09 02:02
Jupiter 08:52 15:52 22:53
Saturn 04:27 10:23 16:20
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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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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Jacksonville

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EDT

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