Conjunction of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Saturn and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 1°07' to the south of Mars.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dusk.

Saturn will be at mag 0.1, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and Mars 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
Saturn 07h34m00s 21°41'N Gemini 0.1 16"5
Mars 07h34m00s 22°48'N Gemini 1.8 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Jun 2034

The sky on 26 June 2034
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:10


Waxing Gibbous

80%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:35 11:46 18:57
Venus 08:36 15:46 22:55
Moon 15:53 21:17 02:36
Mars 06:37 14:07 21:37
Jupiter 01:03 07:17 13:32
Saturn 06:42 14:07 21:32
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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30 Mar 2035  –  Saturn 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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