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

Close approach of Mars and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Mars and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within a mere 1.1 arcminutes of each other.

From Seattle , the pair will become visible at around 17:49 (PDT), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 21:35.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Mars will be at mag 0.9; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and Neptune around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Mars 22h45m30s 8°48'S Aquarius 0.9 5"7
Neptune 22h45m30s 8°47'S Aquarius 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 58° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Dec 2016

The sky on 31 December 2016
Sunrise
07:55
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:20
Twilight begins
06:03

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

11%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:12 11:40 16:08
Venus 10:24 15:25 20:26
Moon 09:19 14:16 19:17
Mars 10:46 16:10 21:33
Jupiter 01:13 06:46 12:19
Saturn 06:28 10:48 15:08
All times shown in PST.

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

19 Nov 2016  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
16 Jun 2017  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
04 Sep 2017  –  Neptune at opposition
22 Nov 2017  –  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.

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