Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 25' to the north of Mars.

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

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 Venus 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
Venus 09h04m30s 18°23'N Cancer -3.9 10"9
Mars 09h04m30s 17°58'N Cancer 1.8 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Aug 2025

The sky on 13 August 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:12
Twilight begins
04:37


Waning Gibbous

70%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:56 11:46 18:36
Venus 03:24 10:29 17:35
Moon 21:47 04:11 10:46
Mars 09:37 15:36 21:36
Jupiter 03:14 10:23 17:32
Saturn 21:32 03:30 09:27
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.

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10 Oct 1958  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
08 Nov 1958  –  Mars at perigee
16 Nov 1958  –  Mars at opposition

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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