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 43" to the south of 134340 Pluto.

From Washington however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 19° above the horizon at dawn.

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 134340 Pluto at mag 15.1, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 19h46m00s 22°00'S Sagittarius 0.9 6"1
134340 Pluto 19h46m00s 22°00'S Sagittarius 15.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Mar 2020

The sky on 23 March 2020
Sunrise
07:30
Sunset
19:48
Twilight ends
21:16
Twilight begins
06:02

29-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 11:58 17:28
Venus 09:21 16:30 23:39
Moon 07:34 13:23 19:19
Mars 04:23 09:15 14:07
Jupiter 04:13 09:07 14:00
Saturn 04:37 09:35 14:34
All times shown in MDT.

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

14 Jul 2019  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
15 Jul 2020  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
17 Jul 2021  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
19 Jul 2022  –  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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37.13°N
113.51°W
MDT

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