Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 9°24' to the south of Mars.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 09h02m20s 8°37'N Cancer -4.3 53"3
Mars 09h02m20s 18°02'N Cancer 1.8 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Jul 2024

The sky on 19 July 2024
Sunrise
05:34
Sunset
20:21
Twilight ends
22:20
Twilight begins
03:34


Waxing Gibbous

96%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:54 14:45 21:35
Venus 06:35 13:50 21:04
Moon 19:29 23:48 04:09
Mars 01:34 08:48 16:02
Jupiter 02:18 09:42 17:06
Saturn 22:43 04:24 10:05
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

19 May 2014  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
17 Apr 2016  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
22 May 2016  –  Mars at opposition
30 May 2016  –  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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