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 2°10' to the south of Mars.

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 1° 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 -4.2, and Mars at mag 1.4, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 04h10m10s 18°54'N Taurus -4.2 53"0
Mars 04h10m10s 21°04'N Taurus 1.4 3"9

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

The sky on 14 Jun 2028

The sky on 14 June 2028
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:22
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
02:49

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

50%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:26 11:35 18:45
Venus 04:04 11:20 18:37
Moon 00:17 06:10 12:12
Mars 03:54 11:20 18:46
Jupiter 12:05 18:29 00:53
Saturn 02:46 09:32 16:19
All times shown in EDT.

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

01 Apr 2027  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
14 Feb 2029  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
25 Mar 2029  –  Mars at opposition
29 Mar 2029  –  Mars at perigee

Image credit

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

Share

Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

Color scheme