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°10' 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 1° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and Mars at mag 1.4, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h10m10s 18°54'N Taurus -4.2 53"0
Mars 04h10m10s 21°04'N Taurus 1.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Jun 2028

The sky on 14 June 2028
Sunrise
05:16
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:08


Waning Gibbous

50%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:37 11:44 18:50
Venus 04:16 11:29 18:42
Moon 00:25 06:19 12:21
Mars 04:07 11:29 18:51
Jupiter 12:15 18:38 01:01
Saturn 02:56 09:41 16:26
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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29 Mar 2029  –  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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