Conjunction of Mars and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mars and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 46' to the north of Uranus.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:41 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 46° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:58.

Mars will be at mag 1.3, and Uranus at mag 5.5, both in the constellation Leo.

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 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 09h33m40s 15°58'N Leo 1.3 5"3
Uranus 09h33m40s 15°11'N Leo 5.5 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 64° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2024

The sky on 25 July 2024
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:11
Twilight begins
03:43


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:02 14:41 21:20
Venus 06:50 13:56 21:02
Moon 22:28 04:24 10:33
Mars 01:24 08:42 16:00
Jupiter 01:59 09:24 16:48
Saturn 22:19 04:00 09:40
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

20 Apr 2043  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
27 Nov 2043  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
09 Feb 2044  –  Uranus at opposition
24 Apr 2044  –  Uranus 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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