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 3°45' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:53 (PDT), 24° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 33 minutes after the Sun at 20:24.

Mars will be at mag 0.9, and 134340 Pluto at mag 14.9, 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 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 18h48m50s 24°26'S Sagittarius 0.9 5"4
134340 Pluto 18h48m50s 20°41'S Sagittarius 14.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2025

The sky on 1 July 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waxing Crescent

44%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 14:43 21:41
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:41
Moon 12:09 18:15 00:12
Mars 10:21 16:50 23:19
Jupiter 05:21 12:31 19:42
Saturn 00:22 06:21 12:20
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

04 Jul 2014  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
06 Jul 2015  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
07 Jul 2016  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
09 Jul 2017  –  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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