Conjunction of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°24' to the north of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 21° above the horizon at dusk.

Mars will be at mag 1.3, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h51m50s 5°18'N Pisces 1.3 4"4
Neptune 00h51m50s 3°53'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Feb 2032

The sky on 25 February 2032
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
17:37
Twilight ends
19:09
Twilight begins
05:00


Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 13:07 19:02
Venus 05:31 10:28 15:26
Moon 17:23 23:52 06:13
Mars 08:01 14:23 20:44
Jupiter 04:26 09:08 13:51
Saturn 11:06 18:29 01:53
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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25 Dec 2032  –  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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