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°50' to the north of Neptune.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 18:13 (EDT), 39° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:01.

Mars will be at mag 1.1, 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 01h06m10s 7°09'N Pisces 1.1 5"4
Neptune 01h06m10s 5°19'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 59° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Feb 2034

The sky on 7 February 2034
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
17:04
Twilight ends
18:40
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Gibbous

79%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:55 12:22 17:49
Venus 07:19 12:30 17:41
Moon 20:35 02:45 08:48
Mars 09:09 15:38 22:08
Jupiter 07:54 13:28 19:02
Saturn 14:04 21:36 05:08
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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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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