Conjunction of Mars and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 7°18' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

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 10° above the horizon at dawn.

Mars will be at mag 1.5, and 134340 Pluto at mag 14.6, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and 134340 Pluto 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 17h49m30s 23°51'S Sagittarius 1.5 4"0
134340 Pluto 17h49m30s 16°33'S Sagittarius 14.6 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jul 2025

The sky on 12 July 2025
Sunrise
05:47
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:46
Twilight begins
04:05


Waning Gibbous

94%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:31 21:15
Venus 03:00 09:58 16:56
Moon 21:15 02:16 07:23
Mars 10:09 16:31 22:53
Jupiter 04:49 11:59 19:09
Saturn 23:40 05:38 11:37
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

16 Jun 2006  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
19 Jun 2007  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
20 Jun 2008  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
23 Jun 2009  –  134340 Pluto at opposition

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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