Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°42' to the south of Mars.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:23 (PDT) – 3 hours and 45 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 36° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:25.

Venus will be at mag -4.4, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Leo.

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 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 11h17m00s 4°26'N Leo -4.4 26"2
Mars 11h17m00s 6°08'N Leo 1.7 4"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jul 2025

The sky on 9 July 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:02


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:38 21:25
Venus 02:59 09:56 16:52
Moon 19:48 00:28 05:13
Mars 10:12 16:36 23:00
Jupiter 04:58 12:08 19:18
Saturn 23:51 05:50 11:49
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

11 May 1982  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
05 Apr 1984  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
11 May 1984  –  Mars at opposition
19 May 1984  –  Mars at perigee

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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