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 3°36' 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 6° above the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -4.5, and Mars at mag 1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h26m00s 7°19'N Leo -4.5 40"4
Mars 10h26m00s 10°55'N Leo 1.8 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:27

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:42 11:35 18:28
Venus 08:11 14:13 20:14
Moon 04:22 11:47 18:59
Mars 00:13 07:49 15:26
Jupiter 23:40 07:11 14:42
Saturn 19:37 01:13 06:49
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

01 Jan 1991  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
28 Nov 1992  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
03 Jan 1993  –  Mars at perigee
07 Jan 1993  –  Mars at opposition

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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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