Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 51' to the north of Mars.

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

From Columbus 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 dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 20h15m30s 19°54'S Capricornus -3.9 11"8
Mars 20h15m30s 20°45'S Capricornus 1.3 4"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
20:35
Twilight ends
22:23
Twilight begins
04:31


Waxing Gibbous

99%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:11 18:46
Venus 04:30 10:40 16:50
Moon 18:02 --:-- 04:59
Mars 11:54 19:07 02:19
Jupiter 08:19 15:46 23:13
Saturn 04:20 10:14 16:09
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.

Related news

01 Jan 1991  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
28 Nov 1992  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
03 Jan 1993  –  Mars at perigee
07 Jan 1993  –  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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