Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 42' to the south of Mars.

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 7° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair 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.

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 07h40m10s 21°39'N Gemini -3.9 10"5
Mars 07h40m10s 22°21'N Gemini 1.7 3"7

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

The sky on 5 Aug 2030

The sky on 5 August 2030
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:52
Twilight begins
03:43


Waxing Crescent

47%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:03 14:29 20:54
Venus 03:57 11:26 18:54
Moon 12:33 17:43 22:46
Mars 03:54 11:26 18:58
Jupiter 13:48 18:49 23:50
Saturn 00:49 08:08 15:27
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

05 May 2029  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
28 Mar 2031  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
04 May 2031  –  Mars at opposition
11 May 2031  –  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.

Share