Conjunction of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°40' to the south of Mars.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:43, when they reach an altitude of 10° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:14, 64° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:17, 60° above your south-western horizon.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.2, and Mars at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 10h48m40s 8°41'N Leo -2.2 37"8
Mars 10h48m40s 10°21'N Leo 0.4 8"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 101° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Dec 2025

The sky on 16 December 2025
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:44
Twilight ends
18:13
Twilight begins
05:18


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:21 10:27 15:33
Venus 06:28 11:24 16:21
Moon 04:01 09:06 14:06
Mars 07:20 12:12 17:05
Jupiter 18:44 01:49 08:55
Saturn 12:02 17:54 23:45
All times shown in PST.

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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26 Dec 1979  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
24 Feb 1980  –  Jupiter at opposition
26 Apr 1980  –  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.

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