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

Close approach of Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 1°55' of each other.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 17:49 (EST), 17° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 49 minutes after the Sun at 19:56.

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 -4.7; and Mars will be at mag 1.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 19h20m20s 25°15'S Sagittarius -4.7 39"3
Mars 19h22m30s 23°24'S Sagittarius 1.1 4"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Nov 2029

The sky on 29 November 2029
Sunrise
07:29
Sunset
17:07
Twilight ends
18:43
Twilight begins
05:53

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

39%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:58 13:27 17:56
Venus 10:46 15:17 19:47
Moon 00:29 06:48 12:56
Mars 10:40 15:19 19:57
Jupiter 05:32 10:43 15:54
Saturn 16:10 23:06 06:03
All times shown in EST.

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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04 May 2031  –  Mars at opposition
11 May 2031  –  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.

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Columbus

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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