Conjunction of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°43' to the north of Uranus.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:05 (EST), 62° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:54.

Mars will be at mag 0.2, and Uranus at mag 5.8, both in the constellation Aries.

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 Uranus 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 02h17m00s 14°58'N Aries 0.2 8"5
Uranus 02h17m00s 13°15'N Aries 5.8 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 95° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Jan 2021

The sky on 21 January 2021
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:55
Twilight ends
18:32
Twilight begins
05:34


Waxing Gibbous

64%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:10 13:17 18:24
Venus 06:20 10:57 15:35
Moon 11:46 18:35 01:34
Mars 11:06 18:03 01:00
Jupiter 07:33 12:27 17:20
Saturn 07:22 12:12 17:03
All times shown in EST.

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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04 Nov 2021  –  Uranus at opposition
18 Jan 2022  –  Uranus 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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