Conjunction of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 3°03' to the north of Uranus.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:03 (EDT), 56° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:02, 67° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:15, when they sink below 20° above your western horizon.

Mars will be at mag -0.4, and Uranus at mag 5.4, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h44m10s 21°51'N Cancer -0.4 11"3
Uranus 08h44m10s 18°48'N Cancer 5.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 132° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
03:40


Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:00 14:43 21:25
Venus 06:45 13:54 21:03
Moon 21:35 02:43 08:00
Mars 01:27 08:44 16:01
Jupiter 02:06 09:30 16:54
Saturn 22:27 04:08 09:48
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

30 Jan 2042  –  Uranus at opposition
15 Apr 2042  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
22 Nov 2042  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
04 Feb 2043  –  Uranus at opposition

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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