This is Ephemeris for Wednesday, August 20th. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 48 minutes, setting at 8:39, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:52. The Moon, 3 days before new, will rise at 4:41 tomorrow morning.
Let’s take our weekly look at the whereabouts of the naked-eye planets. The Red Planet Mars is too close to the direction of the Sun to spot. This is the curse of trying to view evening planets, which are near the direction of the Sun in late summer and early fall, for us at higher latitudes. Saturn now rises at 9:55 PM in the east. In a telescope Saturn sports a very thin ring, a bit less than 3° from being edge on. By 6 AM Saturn will be in the southwest. Jupiter will appear above the brighter Venus in the Eastern sky And among the brighter winter stars. Venus is by far the brighter of the two planets. Mercury will be below the crescent Moon tomorrow morning.
The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.
Addendum
Saturn is seen low in the east at 11 PM tonight, August 20, 2025. It’s below the Great Square of Pegasus seen standing on one corner above and left of it. Created using Stellarium.
Three of the four morning planets are visible, along with the crescent Moon, in the east at 6:00 AM tomorrow morning, August 21, 2025. Saturn is off in the southwest. Mercury will be visible for the next few days before it heads back toward the Sun. The Moon needed a bit of cosmetic surgery to have it show up better. Stellarium doesn’t handle real thin crescent moon images well at this small of a scale. Created using Stellarium and GIMP.
Telescopic Saturn, Jupiter and Venus (north up) as they would be seen in a small telescope with the same magnification. On the morning of the August 21st 2025, Saturn will be 19.1″ in diameter, but its rings, even being nearly edge on, should show up brighter than seen here., and extend to 44.5″. They are tilted 2.9° from being edge on. Jupiter will be 33.6″ in diameter. Venus’ apparent diameter will be 12.9″, and be 81.4% illuminated. Mercury, too small to be shown here, is 7.0″ in diameter, and 49.9% illuminated. The ” means seconds of arc, or 1/3600th of a degree. Created using Cartes du Ciel (Sky Charts), LibreOffice Draw and GIMP.
The naked-eye planets and the Moon at sunset and sunrise on a single night, starting with sunset on the right on August 20, 2025. The night ends on the left with sunrise on the 21st. Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Created using my LookingUp app and GIMP.
This is a low precision ephemeris of the Sun Moon and naked eye planet positions for today and tomorrow, August 20th and 21st, 2025. Some of the columns are self-explanatory, others are not. The transit column is the time that the body crosses the meridian and is due south. Elong, for elongation, is the angle between the Sun and that body. RA is right ascension, which is the object’s east-west position on the celestial sphere in hours and minutes. Dec is declination which is the north-south position of the object on the celestial sphere in degrees and minutes. R is the distance of that object from the Sun in astronomical units. An astronomical unit is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. And Delta is the distance of that object from the Earth, also in astronomical units. I omit the ‘m’ in am and pm for compactness. The data was generated using my LookingUp for DOS app and displayed as a table by my Ephemeris Helper app.
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