The coming week offers a chance to see a close pass of the two brightest planets in the sky.
Where have all the planets gone? August 2025 sees all of the naked eye worlds excepting Mars hiding in the dawn. Set your alarm, and you can uncover Mercury through Saturn all in the dawn twilight sky, crowned with a fine conjunction of Jupiter and Venus on Tuesday, August 12th. This is one of the finest planet-planet pairings for 2025.
Jupiter passes 54’ from Venus on Tuesday, August 12th, at around 5:00 Universal Time (UT), 1:00 AM EDT. -2nd magnitude Jupiter presents a 33” disk, while -4th magnitude Venus presents a 79% illuminated gibbous disk, 13” across. You can see the changing scene each morning starting this weekend, as the two get ever closer from one morning to the next.
How rare is a pairing of Venus and Jupiter? Well, Venus always hangs near the Sun in the dawn and dusk sky, never straying more than about 47 degrees in apparent separation during its 225-day orbit. Meanwhile, stately Jupiter takes 11.9 years to orbit the Sun, meaning the annual orbit of the Earth is the bigger driver as to exactly when Venus and Jupiter pair up.
The last time the two teamed up was on May 24th, 2024, and the two won’t pass each other again until August 26th, 2027. There are 64 Jupiter-Venus conjunctions closer than one degree apart in the 21st century. This bears out the once every year/every other year pattern.
The very best event this century occurs when Venus actually transits or passes in front of Jupiter on the morning of (mark your calendars) November 22nd, 2065. We found only 11 such events over the three-millennium span running from 2000 to 5000 AD:
You can easily follow the pair right up into the sunrise. Venus is an easy naked-eye daytime target… if you know exactly where to look for it. Ghostly Jupiter is tougher at six times fainter, requiring a pristine clear blue sky to spot. Binoculars can help you in your daytime planetary quest.
A nearby crescent Moon can also help serve as a guidepost, and the waning crescent Moon slides past the pair on the mornings of August 19th and 20th.
At the telescope, you’ll be able to fit both planets in the same one-degree-wide, low-power field of view on Tuesday morning. If your telescope can auto-track (or if you feel up to manually tracking the pair) you can follow Venus and Jupiter right up into the daytime sky.
Now, here’s the 'Wow! Factor' for the event. Jupiter is actually 5.9 AU (889.7 million kilometers) away, while Venus is just one-fifth the distance at 1.2 AU (185.3 million kilometers) distant. Slide Jupiter up to the distance of Venus, and it would present a dazzling -5 magnitude, 13’ disk... easily apparent to the naked eye at nearly half the size of a Full Moon.
This conjunction also occurs right around the time of the peak for the 2025 Perseid meteors. You can also see Saturn high to the south near sunrise, and Mercury just makes an appearance below the Jupiter-Venus pair before daylight overwhelms the scene.
Be sure to share the pairing with the public; there tends to be lots of interest around planetary meetups (remember the Christmastime Jupiter and Saturn conjunction back in 2020?). I once had an astrology-minded neighbor in Arizona who expressed a keen interest in a similar close dawn conjunction. Wake up early, I said, and I’ll set up to show it to you before work. Now, it meant something different to her; but as we looked at the pair in the eyepiece and in the sky, we shared a brief view of the clockwork cosmos, as planets danced in the dawn.
Don't miss next week's pairing of the two brightest planets. It's worth the early wake-up.