Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 41.6 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 7° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will 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 13h18m30s 8°25'S Virgo -4.0 14"2
Uranus 13h19m40s 7°47'S Virgo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Sep 2025

The sky on 29 September 2025
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
18:38
Twilight ends
20:01
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Crescent

48%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:43 13:26 19:09
Venus 04:48 11:13 17:38
Moon 14:11 18:50 23:31
Mars 08:59 14:26 19:52
Jupiter 00:47 07:52 14:57
Saturn 18:19 00:13 06:07
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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15 Apr 1974  –  Uranus at opposition
01 Jul 1974  –  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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