How to watch Venus and Mars align in a unique planetary conjunction tonight

At the end of last year, Jupiter and Saturn offered sky-watchers a unique experience “great conjunction“, when they were closer in the night sky than they had been since medieval times. And in January, the two largest planets in our solar system were joined by a third – Mercury – forming a rare conjunction with three planets.

Now it’s the turn of the closest cosmic neighbors to Earth. On Monday July 12, Venus and Mars will align for their own planetary conjunction.

Our “sister planet” Venus – the planet whose orbit is closest to Earth’s orbit – is sometimes referred to as the “morning star” or “evening star”, depending on whether it is visible at sunrise or at night. sunset. This month is the latter, with the rocky and hellish world appearing low in the west for half an hour after sunset.

All month Venus and March, the other neighbor of the Earth, come closer and closer. On Monday evening, the evening star and the red planet will appear in the sky a finger’s width apart, NASA said.

In June, NASA announced two new space missions which will travel to Venus between 2028 and 2030. The next voyages will be the first time in 30 years that NASA probes have visited the “inferno-like” planet.

VERITAS and DAVINCI + will study the surface and atmosphere of the planet, promising to return spectacular new images, maps and other data, in order to find out why and how Venus has become so inhospitable to life.

How to look at the conjunction

Venus and Mars will appear to almost overlap in the night sky on the evening of July 12, and will still appear extremely close on July 13, just after sunset. If you raise your hand to the sky, the planets will appear on either side of your index finger.

Mars will appear half a degree below Venus, with the pair only about 4 degrees above the west-northwest horizon as twilight ends at 9.44 p.m. EDT, NASA said. . Mars will go to bed first, approximately 23 minutes later at 10:07 p.m. ET.

According to EarthSky, Venus will appear extremely bright in the night sky, about 200 times brighter than Mars, which will still be easily spotted with its characteristic reddish hue. A telescope or binoculars will help visibility, but both planets will be clear to the naked eye once the sun is low enough in the sky.

The time and date follow the movements and visibility of the planets, which should be better than normal as long as the sky is clear and you have a clear view of the horizon. It will be several years before Venus and Mars align again, so be sure to look up!

You can seek planetary alignment with a thin crescent moon, illuminated at only 10%, allowing even clearer visibility of the celestial phenomenon. After the conjunction, Venus will continue to move further to the left each night, away from Mars and towards the bright star Regulus.

Also occurring late at night from Monday to Tuesday morning, an near-Earth asteroid, named 2019 AT6, will pass close to Earth. Measuring between 26 and 59 feet in diameter, it will pass Earth at 11,500 miles per hour, is expected to approach 883,930 miles, or about 3.7 lunar distances.