Conjunction of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 2°11' to the south of Neptune.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:57 (PDT), 36° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:38.

Mars will be at mag 0.1, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h33m30s 20°50'S Capricornus 0.1 8"5
Neptune 20h33m30s 18°38'S Capricornus 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 83° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2025

The sky on 30 June 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56


Waxing Crescent

39%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 14:43 21:42
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:40
Moon 11:11 17:34 23:48
Mars 10:22 16:52 23:22
Jupiter 05:24 12:34 19:45
Saturn 00:26 06:25 12:24
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

17 Oct 2001  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
13 May 2002  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
01 Aug 2002  –  Neptune at opposition
20 Oct 2002  –  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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