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

Conjunction of Jupiter and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 18' to the south of Mars.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:41 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 46° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:07.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.2, and Mars at mag 0.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 05h00m50s 22°02'N Taurus -2.2 35"8
Mars 05h00m50s 22°21'N Taurus 0.8 6"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 65° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Aug 2024

The sky on 14 August 2024
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
19:46
Twilight ends
21:34
Twilight begins
03:59

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

74%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:42 13:11 19:40
Venus 07:28 14:03 20:38
Moon 16:15 20:23 00:28
Mars 00:39 08:11 15:43
Jupiter 00:41 08:11 15:42
Saturn 20:51 02:28 08:06
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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04 Feb 2025  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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