The Moon, 134340 Pluto and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 2°39' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.
From Cambridge , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:24 (EDT) – 2 hours and 1 minute before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:53.
The Moon will be at mag -11.0; 134340 Pluto will be at mag 0.0; and Mars will be at mag 0.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.
They 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 the Moon and 134340 Pluto around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 23h49m20s | 0°11'N | Pisces | -11.0 | 32'42"6 |
| 134340 Pluto | 00h00m00s | 0°00'N | Pisces | 0.0 | 0"0 |
| Mars | 23h54m30s | 2°12'S | Pisces | 0.9 | 5"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
The sky on 8 Jul 2024
| The sky on 8 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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12% 3 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 09 Dec 2005 | – Mars ends retrograde motion |
| 15 Nov 2007 | – Mars enters retrograde motion |
| 18 Dec 2007 | – Mars at perigee |
| 24 Dec 2007 | – Mars 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.