Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 3.6 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:35 (PDT) – 3 hours and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 32° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible 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 Uranus 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 11h54m20s 1°20'N Virgo -4.4 24"8
Uranus 11h54m20s 1°23'N Virgo 5.5 3"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

72%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
All times shown in PDT.

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.

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17 Mar 1968  –  Uranus at opposition
01 Jun 1968  –  Uranus 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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