Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 18' to the south of Mars.

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

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

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

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 17h55m50s 24°44'S Sagittarius -3.9 11"4
Mars 17h55m50s 24°25'S Sagittarius 1.3 4"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2027

The sky on 24 November 2027
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Crescent

7%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:54 10:50 15:46
Venus 09:00 13:24 17:48
Moon 02:58 08:26 13:45
Mars 08:59 13:25 17:50
Jupiter 00:53 07:09 13:25
Saturn 14:27 20:52 03:16
All times shown in EST.

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.

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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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