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

Conjunction of Mars and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mars and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 3°45' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

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 18° above the horizon at dusk.

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Mars will be at mag 0.9, and 134340 Pluto at mag 14.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 134340 Pluto 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 18h49m40s 24°25'S Sagittarius 0.9 5"4
134340 Pluto 18h49m40s 20°40'S Sagittarius 14.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 53° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:06
Twilight ends
20:43
Twilight begins
04:53

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

79%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:54 13:46 20:38
Venus 05:59 11:45 17:31
Moon 22:47 03:35 08:15
Mars 05:20 10:43 16:05
Jupiter 08:06 15:10 22:14
Saturn 05:41 11:14 16:47
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

04 Jul 2014  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
06 Jul 2015  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
08 Jul 2016  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
10 Jul 2017  –  134340 Pluto 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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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