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 10.9 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:58 (EDT), 35° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 17:16, 36° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 21:30, when they sink below 10° above your south-western horizon.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.4; and Mars will be at mag 0.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

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 22h07m50s 12°42'S Aquarius -2.4 38"1
Mars 22h08m10s 12°52'S Aquarius 0.3 7"9

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

The sky on 1 Dec 2033

The sky on 1 December 2033
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:17

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

74%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:56 10:50 15:44
Venus 06:16 11:06 15:57
Moon 13:24 19:49 02:22
Mars 12:00 17:17 22:35
Jupiter 11:58 17:16 22:34
Saturn 19:13 02:37 10:02
All times shown in EST.

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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28 Nov 2034  –  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
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