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 29' 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 however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dusk.

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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 09h28m30s 16°38'N Leo -3.9 11"6
Mars 09h28m30s 16°08'N Leo 1.8 3"7

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

The sky on 13 Jul 2021

The sky on 13 July 2021
Sunrise
05:29
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:27
Twilight begins
03:26

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

14%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:09 11:36 19:03
Venus 07:52 14:55 21:59
Moon 08:59 16:04 22:57
Mars 07:53 14:55 21:56
Jupiter 22:21 03:41 09:01
Saturn 21:26 02:23 07:20
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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30 Oct 2022  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
30 Nov 2022  –  Mars at perigee
08 Dec 2022  –  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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