Ashraf Tadros, professor of astronomy at the National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research, said that tomorrow, Wednesday, dawn will witness the phenomenon of the conjunction of Venus with Mars, and they can be seen with the naked eye from their sunrise at four o’clock in the morning until they disappear from the intensity of morning twilight as a result of sunrise.
Tadros indicated – in a statement to the Middle East News Agency, today – that the conjunction is the approach of a celestial body to another celestial body within a number of arc degrees when they are viewed from the earth, which is an unreal apparent angular approach that has nothing to do with distances, and the real distance between them They are very large, estimated at hundreds of millions or billions of kilometers.
For his part, the President of the Astronomical Society in Jeddah, Eng. Majed Abu Zahira, said in a statement today that it will separate the planets Venus and Mars at dawn tomorrow, Wednesday, by 3 degrees, and they will be regular in a celestial triangle with Saturn on the southeastern horizon in a phenomenon seen with the naked eye.
He added that Venus will appear as a bright point of light, while Mars will appear faint at the bottom right of Venus for the observer, and due to the wide distance between them, they will not appear together in the telescope’s field of view, but this can be done through binoculars.
He stated that Mars will appear faint because it is far from the Earth at the present time, as it is almost on the other side of the sun relative to the Earth at a distance of about 285 million km, while Venus is 94 million km away and has a diameter twice the diameter of Mars and around it a permanent cloud cover that surpasses In contrast to sunlight.
He asserted that the convergence of Venus and Mars is just an optical illusion; Because the planets are separated by millions of kilometers, but they appear close to each other from our perspective on Earth only.