The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

Jupiter and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 38' to the north of Mars.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:38 (EDT) – 2 hours and 44 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:40.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.3, and Mars at mag 0.7, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Jupiter 00h12m30s 0°06'N Pisces -2.3 36"2
Mars 00h12m30s 0°31'S Pisces 0.7 6"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 64° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 May 2022

The sky on 28 May 2022
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:17
Twilight begins
03:21

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 12:09 19:13
Venus 03:45 10:22 16:58
Moon 04:18 11:25 18:43
Mars 02:39 08:40 14:41
Jupiter 02:37 08:41 14:44
Saturn 01:07 06:19 11:31
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.

Related news

18 Oct 2021  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Jul 2022  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
26 Sep 2022  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Nov 2022  –  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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme