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 1°47' to the north of Mars.

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

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 20:28 (PDT), 37° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 56 minutes after the Sun at 23:50.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0, and Mars at mag 0.6, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 13h12m10s 6°20'S Virgo -2.0 34"9
Mars 13h12m10s 8°08'S Virgo 0.6 7"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Jul 2029

The sky on 20 July 2029
Sunrise
05:51
Sunset
19:54
Twilight ends
21:31
Twilight begins
04:14

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

83%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:49 13:44 20:40
Venus 08:20 14:58 21:36
Moon 15:40 20:49 01:56
Mars 12:21 18:03 23:45
Jupiter 12:17 18:04 23:50
Saturn 01:31 08:17 15:03
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

13 Jun 2029  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Mar 2030  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
13 May 2030  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Jul 2030  –  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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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