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 2°02' to the south of Mars.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:07 (EDT), 57° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:38.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.3, and Mars at mag 0.9, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h45m10s 15°01'N Aries -2.3 37"1
Mars 02h45m10s 17°03'N Aries 0.9 6"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 73° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jul 2024

The sky on 1 July 2024
Sunrise
05:21
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:14

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

16%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:46 14:14 21:41
Venus 05:56 13:27 20:59
Moon 01:37 08:55 16:27
Mars 02:08 09:08 16:08
Jupiter 03:16 10:37 17:59
Saturn 23:54 05:36 11:17
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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09 Feb 2037  –  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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