Conjunction of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 39' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:30 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 39° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:08.

Mars will be at mag -0.0, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 01h48m20s 8°42'N Pisces -0.0 9"1
Neptune 01h48m20s 9°21'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 85° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
03:19


Waxing Crescent

3%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 14:31 21:47
Venus 06:08 13:35 21:03
Moon 06:44 14:31 22:08
Mars 01:56 09:01 16:07
Jupiter 02:57 10:19 17:42
Saturn 23:31 05:12 10:53
All times shown in EDT.

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.

Related news

03 Jan 2037  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
01 Aug 2037  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
20 Oct 2037  –  Neptune at opposition
06 Jan 2038  –  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.

Share