Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°44' to the south of Neptune.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:00 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 26° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 03:36.
Mars will be at mag -0.2, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Aquarius.
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 | 23h27m10s | 6°25'S | Aquarius | -0.2 | 10"0 |
| Neptune | 23h27m10s | 4°41'S | Aquarius | 7.9 | 2"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 91° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 12 Jun 2020
| The sky on 12 June 2020 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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52% 21 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.
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| 22 Jun 2020 | – Neptune enters retrograde motion |
| 11 Sep 2020 | – Neptune at opposition |
| 28 Nov 2020 | – 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.