Conjunction of Mars and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 7°50' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:20 (PDT) – 3 hours and 23 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 27° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:44.

Mars will be at mag 1.7, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.2, both in the constellation Leo.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and 134340 Pluto 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 09h47m30s 14°38'N Leo 1.7 4"0
134340 Pluto 09h47m30s 22°29'N Leo 15.2 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Sep 2025

The sky on 12 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:27
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Gibbous

64%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 12:47 19:05
Venus 04:15 11:00 17:44
Moon 21:29 04:44 12:09
Mars 09:11 14:49 20:28
Jupiter 01:42 08:49 15:55
Saturn 19:30 01:25 07:20
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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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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