The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 20.1 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:50 (EDT), 21° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 23 minutes after the Sun at 22:53.

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Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 09h35m20s 14°54'N Leo -4.4 32"4
Jupiter 09h36m10s 15°11'N Leo -1.8 31"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Mar 2024

The sky on 18 March 2024
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:35
Twilight begins
05:24

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

73%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:31 13:58 20:26
Venus 06:18 11:46 17:15
Moon 12:27 20:34 04:34
Mars 05:48 11:02 16:15
Jupiter 08:55 15:53 22:52
Saturn 06:28 12:01 17:33
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

08 Apr 2015  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
07 Jan 2016  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 Mar 2016  –  Jupiter at opposition
09 May 2016  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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