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

Conjunction of Saturn and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Saturn and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Saturn passing 19' to the north of Mars.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Ashburn , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:44 (EDT) – 2 hours and 4 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.

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Saturn will be at mag 0.7, and Mars at mag 1.0, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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

A graph of the angular separation between Saturn and Mars 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
Saturn 21h39m00s 15°02'S Capricornus 0.7 15"8
Mars 21h39m00s 15°22'S Capricornus 1.0 5"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2022

The sky on 4 April 2022
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
19:36
Twilight ends
21:08
Twilight begins
05:15

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

16%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 13:19 19:40
Venus 04:55 10:20 15:46
Moon 08:35 15:51 23:17
Mars 04:45 09:56 15:08
Jupiter 06:00 11:49 17:39
Saturn 04:44 09:57 15:10
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.

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14 Aug 2022  –  Saturn at opposition
22 Oct 2022  –  Saturn 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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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