Conjunction of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 2°02' to the south of Neptune.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 21:17 (PDT), 32° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:08.

Mars will be at mag 0.6, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and Neptune 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
Mars 12h59m00s 6°37'S Virgo 0.6 7"2
Neptune 12h59m00s 4°34'S Virgo 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 82° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Sep 2025

The sky on 13 September 2025
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:00
Twilight ends
20:25
Twilight begins
05:06


Waning Crescent

48%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:33 12:50 19:06
Venus 04:17 11:01 17:44
Moon 22:14 05:44 13:20
Mars 09:10 14:48 20:26
Jupiter 01:39 08:45 15:52
Saturn 19:25 01:21 07:16
All times shown in PDT.

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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28 Jun 1951  –  Neptune 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.

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