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°17' to the north 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 dawn sky, rising at 02:46 (PDT) – 3 hours and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 27° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:52.

Saturn will be at mag 0.3, and Mars at mag 1.1, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h03m50s 22°19'S Sagittarius 0.3 15"9
Mars 18h03m50s 23°36'S Sagittarius 1.1 5"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Jul 2025

The sky on 29 July 2025
Sunrise
05:58
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:31
Twilight begins
04:21


Waxing Crescent

25%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 13:06 19:45
Venus 03:07 10:13 17:19
Moon 10:54 16:50 22:37
Mars 09:51 16:01 22:12
Jupiter 03:59 11:08 18:18
Saturn 22:33 04:31 10:29
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.

Related news

19 Aug 1987  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion
10 Apr 1988  –  Saturn enters retrograde motion
20 Jun 1988  –  Saturn at opposition
30 Aug 1988  –  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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