The planets Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 37.4 arcminutes of each other.

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 2° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Mars will be at mag 1.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 26° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Feb 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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