The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 6'12" to the north of Mars.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:43 (EDT) – 2 hours and 9 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 14° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:06.

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Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h10m00s 6°45'N Leo -3.9 11"3
Mars 11h10m00s 6°39'N Leo 1.8 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Sep 2024

The sky on 28 September 2024
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
18:39
Twilight ends
20:11
Twilight begins
05:12

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:35 12:37 18:40
Venus 09:23 14:37 19:50
Moon 02:26 09:54 17:11
Mars 23:48 07:19 14:51
Jupiter 22:14 05:42 13:10
Saturn 17:50 23:24 04:58
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.

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10 Jul 1986  –  Mars at opposition
16 Jul 1986  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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