Mars and Venus ‘meeting’ visible with naked eye next week – how to spot them

MARS and Venus will swing by one another next week in a rare celestial rendevous.

Stargazers in the US and UK should be able to spot the dazzling event with the naked eye in the early hours of February 13.

GettyMars and Venus will be in conjunction next week[/caption]

The coming together, known to astronomers as a conjunction, will peak at 02:38 GMT BST (21:38 EST), according to stargazing site InTheSky.org.

The popular platform makes precise predictions about the positions of the planets using public data from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

During the celestial showcase, Venus will swing roughly 6.5 degrees to the north of Mars.

The Red Planet will resemble a bright star.

The uniting planets will be visible just above the horizon to the south.

Venus will be at mag -4.6, and Mars at mag 1.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, InTheSky said.

However, they will be visible to the naked eye, making the conjunction a great bit of stargazing for younger space fans.

Conjunctions of Venus and Mars are relatively rare, but not unheard of. They typically occur a few times a year.

Your best bet of spotting them is using a stargazing Android or iOS app.

Handy Stargazing apps

Sometimes smartphones can be useful to point out the location of constellations and planets in the night sky.

You can try downloading one of these apps to point yourself in the right direction.

Make sure you give your eyes a break from your phone afterwards though, stargazing is best when your eyes have adjusted to the dark.

Stargazing apps for Android and iPhone include: SkyView Lite, Star Tracker and Star Walk 2.

Some apps are free but a lot of them charge so it depends if you want to put up with adverts or not.

It’s advisable to read the reviews of an app and look at how many people have rated it before downloading.

In other news, a four-tonne chunk of a SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the Moon, according to online space junk trackers.

Boeing has sunk $450million into a flying taxi startup that hopes to whisk passengers across cities by the end of the decade.

Personalised smart guns, which can be fired only by verified users, may finally become available to U.S. consumers this year.

And, scientists are embarking on a mission to unravel the mystery behind dozens of grisly child mummies buried in an underground tomb in Sicily.

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