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 58' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

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Mars will be at mag 1.2, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.1, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 20h01m20s 21°24'S Sagittarius 1.2 4"7
134340 Pluto 20h01m20s 22°22'S Sagittarius 15.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Mar 2022

The sky on 3 March 2022
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
17:45
Twilight ends
19:17
Twilight begins
04:50

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 10:39 15:43
Venus 04:00 09:02 14:04
Moon 07:12 12:58 18:55
Mars 04:24 09:07 13:51
Jupiter 06:32 12:10 17:48
Saturn 05:28 10:33 15:38
All times shown in EST.

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

18 Jul 2021  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
20 Jul 2022  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
22 Jul 2023  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
23 Jul 2024  –  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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