Hello fellow amateur stargazers!
If you are blessed to have clear mid-spring skies this time of year, look towards the west about an hour after sunset and you will see our Earth's two closest planetary neighbors moving closer together in the sky at dusk as we move closer to the summer solstice.
As you can see from my photograph (taken on one of the rare cloudless evening skies this month here in South Carolina), both Venus and Mars can both be seen in and near the twin stars: Castor and Pullox -- the two brightest stars of the Constellation Gemini.
Because Venus -- the second planet in our Solar System -- is closer to the Sun, it has a much faster orbit. There are 225 of our Earth days that make up a yearly trip around the Sun for Venus. I say our Earth days because (fun fact) Venus has a very long day -- approximately 243 days for the hot planet to rotate on its axis in fact, making a day on Venus slightly longer than its actual year!
By contrast, Mars has a orbital period of 687 of our Earth day, and a day on Mars is about 24.7 of our hours here on Earth (closer to 25 hours) and takes the Red Planet about a little less than two of our Earth years to revolve around the Sun.
Venus is moving higher in the sky away from the Sun, while Mars is moving much slower but also higher in the sky.
In a little over a month, the orbits of both planets will have them meeting in the night sky in conjunction in the Constellation Leo The Lion on the evening of Saturday, July 1, 2023. The two wanderers will be about 3 degrees apart just above the point of the Summer Triangle and the bright star, Regulus.
Conjunctions between Venus and Mars usually happen once a year and both planets stay close together (at least from out point of view here on Earth) for about ten days to two weeks. After this year, the next Venus-Mars conjunction will take place on Thursday, February 22, 2024.
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