Conjunction of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 59' 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 10° above the horizon at dawn.

Mars will be at mag 1.2, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 21h33m40s 15°43'S Capricornus 1.2 4"7
Neptune 21h33m40s 14°43'S Capricornus 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2025

The sky on 8 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Gibbous

97%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 12:34 19:01
Venus 04:08 10:56 17:45
Moon 19:19 01:16 07:22
Mars 09:14 14:55 20:37
Jupiter 01:55 09:01 16:08
Saturn 19:46 01:42 07:37
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

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24 May 2007  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
13 Aug 2007  –  Neptune at opposition
31 Oct 2007  –  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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