Conjunction of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°31' to the south of Neptune.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dawn.

Mars will be at mag 1.4, and Neptune at mag 8.0, 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 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 19h15m20s 23°05'S Sagittarius 1.4 4"0
Neptune 19h15m20s 21°34'S Sagittarius 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jul 2025

The sky on 13 July 2025
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:06


Waning Gibbous

90%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:29 21:12
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:57
Moon 21:50 03:06 08:30
Mars 10:08 16:29 22:50
Jupiter 04:46 11:56 19:06
Saturn 23:36 05:35 11:33
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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09 Jul 1992  –  Neptune at opposition
27 Sep 1992  –  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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