Close approach of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Venus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within a mere 21.5 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 16° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Neptune will be at mag 8.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 Neptune 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 16h48m10s 20°33'S Ophiuchus -4.1 14"4
Neptune 16h48m00s 20°54'S Ophiuchus 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius 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

77%

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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22 Aug 1976  –  Neptune 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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