Dominic Ford, Editor
From
the Conjunctions
feed
Mars and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 1°03' 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 become visible at around 18:02 (EST) as the dusk sky fades, 50° above your south-western horizon. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 5 hours and 25 minutes after the Sun at 22:47.
Mars will be at mag 1.0, and Uranus at mag 5.8, both in the constellation Aries.
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 | 01h48m20s | +11°40' | Aries | 1.0 | 5"7 |
Uranus | 01h48m20s | +10°37' | Aries | 5.8 | 3"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 64° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.
The sky on 13 February 2019 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
59% 9 days old |
All times shown in EST.
|
Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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
23 Oct 2018 | – Uranus at opposition |
28 Oct 2019 | – Uranus at opposition |
31 Oct 2020 | – Uranus at opposition |
04 Nov 2021 | – 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.