The planets Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 40.7 arcminutes of each other.
From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:18 (EDT) – 3 hours and 59 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 33° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:29.
Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.
They 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.
At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.
A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| Venus | 11h39m20s | 3°00'N | Virgo | -4.3 | 22"1 |
| Mars | 11h40m00s | 3°39'N | Virgo | 1.7 | 4"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.
The sky on 5 May 2024
| The sky on 5 May 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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6% 27 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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.