Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°51' to the south of Mars.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:10 (EDT) – 3 hours and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 33° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:18.

Venus will be at mag -4.2 in the constellation Cancer, and Mars at mag 1.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

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 07h55m50s 18°48'N Cancer -4.2 20"1
Mars 07h55m50s 21°40'N Gemini 1.5 4"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Oct 2024

The sky on 2 October 2024
Sunrise
07:27
Sunset
19:11
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
05:56


Waxing Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:34 13:26 19:18
Venus 10:09 15:18 20:28
Moon 07:14 13:16 19:09
Mars 00:24 07:52 15:19
Jupiter 22:41 06:06 13:30
Saturn 18:11 23:46 05:21
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

24 Mar 1995  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
05 Feb 1997  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
17 Mar 1997  –  Mars at opposition
20 Mar 1997  –  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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