Conjunction of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 1°16' 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 01:46 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 28° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:06.

Saturn will be at mag 0.3, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 Saturn 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
Saturn 16h31m00s 19°57'S Ophiuchus 0.3 16"4
Mars 16h31m00s 21°14'S Ophiuchus 0.9 6"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2024

The sky on 28 June 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12


Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 14:03 21:35
Venus 05:50 13:23 20:56
Moon 00:24 06:28 12:44
Mars 02:13 09:11 16:09
Jupiter 03:25 10:47 18:08
Saturn 00:06 05:48 11:29
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

25 Jul 1985  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
19 Mar 1986  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
27 May 1986  –  Saturn at opposition
07 Aug 1986  –  Saturn 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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