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°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 South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:00 (PDT) – 2 hours and 39 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:56.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and Mars at mag 1.1, 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 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 02h45m50s 13°09'N Aries -4.2 20"5
Mars 02h45m50s 15°11'N Aries 1.1 4"8

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

The sky on 7 Sep 2025

The sky on 7 September 2025
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
19:09
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:01


Waning Gibbous

98%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:02 12:31 19:00
Venus 04:06 10:55 17:45
Moon 18:50 00:27 06:14
Mars 09:15 14:57 20:39
Jupiter 01:58 09:05 16:12
Saturn 19:50 01:46 07:42
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

30 Jan 2008  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
20 Dec 2009  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
27 Jan 2010  –  Mars at perigee
29 Jan 2010  –  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.

Share