The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 47' to the south of Mars.

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

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

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Jupiter will be at mag -1.9, and Mars at mag 1.6, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 06h24m40s 23°08'N Gemini -1.9 31"8
Mars 06h24m40s 23°55'N Gemini 1.6 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Nov 2024

The sky on 27 November 2024
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:07

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:15 12:41 17:06
Venus 10:12 14:37 19:02
Moon 03:16 08:44 14:02
Mars 20:23 03:50 11:17
Jupiter 16:52 00:22 07:53
Saturn 12:42 18:13 23:44
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.

Related news

30 Jan 2013  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 2013  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
05 Jan 2014  –  Jupiter at opposition
06 Mar 2014  –  Jupiter 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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