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

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The sky at

Venus and Mars will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°12' to the north of Mars.

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

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 10° above the horizon at dawn.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Mars at mag 1.7, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h09m30s 16°10'S Libra -4.0 11"2
Mars 15h09m30s 17°22'S Libra 1.7 3"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Apr 2025

The sky on 7 April 2025
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
19:16
Twilight ends
20:55
Twilight begins
04:35

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

80%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:29 11:27 17:24
Venus 04:56 11:11 17:26
Moon 14:07 21:24 04:29
Mars 11:53 19:30 03:07
Jupiter 09:08 16:41 00:13
Saturn 05:35 11:24 17:13
All times shown in EDT.

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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11 Nov 2037  –  Mars at perigee
19 Nov 2037  –  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.

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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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