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

Close approach of Mercury and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The planets Mercury and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 14.6 arcminutes of each other.

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 2° above the horizon at dawn.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Mercury will be at mag -0.2; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 Mercury 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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Mercury 19h14m10s 22°54'S Sagittarius -0.2 5"4
Mars 19h14m10s 23°08'S Sagittarius 1.3 4"0

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

The sky on 27 Jan 2024

The sky on 27 January 2024
Sunrise
07:06
Sunset
17:02
Twilight ends
18:37
Twilight begins
05:31

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

94%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:04 10:41 15:18
Venus 05:10 09:49 14:27
Moon 17:52 01:16 08:28
Mars 06:05 10:41 15:17
Jupiter 10:55 17:44 00:33
Saturn 08:34 13:58 19:23
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

12 Jan 2023  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
06 Dec 2024  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
12 Jan 2025  –  Mars at perigee
15 Jan 2025  –  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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme