Venus and Mercury Visible with the Naked Eye
March 30th, 2010
Venus and Mercury, the two planets closest to the Sun, will be very close to each other in the sky for the next 10 days and are visible without the need for a telescope.
On a clear evening, both planets can be seen with the naked eye by looking west between half an hour and one hour after sunset from anywhere in Spain. Until the 3rd of April, Mercury can be seen below and to the right of Venus, with Venus being the brighter of the two planets, while from April the 4th Mercury will appear just to the right before fading away again over the next few days.
“Mercury is very difficult to see most of the time, so not many people would ever see it in their lifetime, but now there is a good chance thanks to the close proximity of Venus,” explained Alna MacRobert, editor of Sky & Telescope, who have announced the astronomical event.
The closest approach of Venus and Mercury will be on the 3rd and 4th of April, when they will be separated by about three degrees (the width of two fingers held together with an outstretched arm). But from April the 10th, Mercury will be much harder to spot and will become increasingly less visible from Earth.
While the two planets appear quite close from our perspective, there is actually over 80 million kilometres between them. At the moment Venus is much farther away from Earth (about 235 million kilometres) than Mercury (151 million kilometres), which also means that the light emitted from them takes 14 and 8.4 minutes to reach us respectively. However, even though it is further away, Venus appears brighter in the sky than Mercury primarily because its diameter is twice the size and it is also covered by a layer of bright white clouds, compared to the dark surface of Mercury.
