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

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

Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 38' to the north of Mars.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From San Diego 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 dawn.

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

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair 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.

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 20h38m10s 18°53'S Capricornus -3.9 11"3
Mars 20h38m10s 19°31'S Capricornus 1.3 4"1

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

The sky on 22 February 2024
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
17:39
Twilight ends
19:01
Twilight begins
05:00

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:20 11:46 17:12
Venus 05:06 10:19 15:31
Moon 16:07 23:14 06:14
Mars 05:08 10:18 15:29
Jupiter 09:30 16:09 22:49
Saturn 06:46 12:23 18:00
All times shown in PST.

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

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme