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 Eris

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mars and 136199 Eris will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 8°09' to the north of 136199 Eris.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:03, when they reach an altitude of 21° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:02, 49° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:49, 34° above your south-western horizon.

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Mars will be at mag -2.2 in the constellation Pisces, and 136199 Eris at mag 18.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Cetus.

A graph of the angular separation between Mars and 136199 Eris 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 01h47m00s 6°39'N Pisces -2.2 21"4
136199 Eris 01h47m00s 1°29'S Cetus 18.7 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 148° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Sep 2020

The sky on 19 September 2020
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
19:11
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
05:22

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

7%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:53 14:25 19:58
Venus 03:24 10:21 17:18
Moon 09:18 15:10 20:53
Mars 20:37 03:02 09:26
Jupiter 15:43 20:27 01:11
Saturn 16:11 21:00 01:50
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

17 Oct 2019  –  136199 Eris at opposition
17 Oct 2020  –  136199 Eris at opposition
17 Oct 2021  –  136199 Eris at opposition
18 Oct 2022  –  136199 Eris 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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Ashburn

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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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