A Brilliant Dawn Conjunction
The night of August 12 sees the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. It’s always a favorite summer stargazing event for those in the Northern Hemisphere. However, this year the waning gibbous Moon hampers viewing, making 2025 a less than ideal year for the popular Perseids.
However, August 12 brings an even more notable sky sight, but one you have to get up early to see.
Before dawn look east to see a very close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter. The view will be similar to the opening image which captured a close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, with Mars also in attendance, at dawn on October 25, 2015 from Jasper National Park, Alberta.
The SkySafari simulation of what we can expect to see on August 12 is below, with the two planets less than one degree apart, making for a very striking sight in the dawn twilight, viewable from anywhere on the planet.
Through August, Venus is descending closer to the Sun, ending its morning appearance. As it does so, on August 12 Venus passes Jupiter, now climbing higher in the sky each day as it begins its next season of visibility.
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Venus is the brighter of the two worlds, at magnitude -4.0. But Jupiter ranks only second in brilliance for any planet, at magnitude -1.9. So this is a rare chance to see the two brightest planets so close to each other.
While they will be a superb sight to the unaided eye, be sure to train your binoculars at them. You should see three or four of Jupiter’s Galilean moons flanking the planet.
As the illustration above shows, even a telescope will frame both planets, and show their disks. Despite being much closer to us than Jupiter, Venus is far enough away on the far side of its orbit that its disk is now only 13 arc seconds, less than half of Jupiter’s 33 arc seconds. Venus is now at a gibbous phase, similar to the Moon later this night.
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On August 13, you have another chance to enjoy the planet pairing, but now with Venus about a degree and a half below Jupiter. Wider, but still not a bad consolation conjunction!
A week later, the Moon that interfered with our view of the Perseid meteors has now waned to a thin crescent. As I show above, on August 20 the Moon will appear about 4.5º (within a binocular field) above Venus, and below Castor and Pollux in Gemini.
The next morning, on August 21, the very thin Moon sits about 5º above Mercury, then just two days past its greatest elongation from the Sun. But both will be low in the east, demanding a very clear sky and low horizon to sight.
However, the August 12 Venus-Jupiter conjunction is the main celestial attraction for August.
The last time these two planets appeared as close together as this was March 1, 2023 when they were in the evening sky. The next opportunity is on the morning of November 10, 2028.
So try to see this one on a warm summer morning in 2025.
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12 comments
Looking forward to see them! Thanks for the info!
Thanks for your informations !👍