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

Close approach of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Jupiter and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 34.9 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:34 (EST) – 2 hours and 47 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:39.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.3; and Mars will be at mag 0.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Jupiter 00h12m50s 0°08'N Pisces -2.3 36"2
Mars 00h13m40s 0°23'S Pisces 0.7 6"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 64° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 29 May 2022

The sky on 29 May 2022
Sunrise
05:21
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:19
Twilight begins
03:20

29-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 12:04 19:06
Venus 03:44 10:22 17:00
Moon 04:50 12:10 19:41
Mars 02:37 08:39 14:41
Jupiter 02:34 08:38 14:41
Saturn 01:03 06:15 11:27
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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23 Nov 2022  –  Jupiter 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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