The planets Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 24.7 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 18:07 (EST), 16° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 19 minutes after the Sun at 19:44.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Mars around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Nov 2024

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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