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 Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Mars and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Mars passing 2'14" to the south of Neptune.

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

From San Diego however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 7° 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 1.1, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 Neptune 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 23h56m30s 1°44'S Pisces 1.1 4"7
Neptune 23h56m30s 1°42'S Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Apr 2024

The sky on 28 April 2024
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
20:58
Twilight begins
04:31

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

69%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:07 11:22 17:36
Venus 05:40 12:08 18:36
Moon 23:33 04:23 09:12
Mars 04:17 10:15 16:13
Jupiter 06:53 13:43 20:34
Saturn 03:47 09:31 15:16
All times shown in PDT.

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

06 Dec 2023  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
02 Jul 2024  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
20 Sep 2024  –  Neptune at opposition
07 Dec 2024  –  Neptune 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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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