Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 38' to the south of Neptune.

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 5° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair 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.

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

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 17h31m50s 22°37'S Ophiuchus -3.9 10"8
Neptune 17h31m50s 21°59'S Ophiuchus 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Dec 2025

The sky on 22 December 2025
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
16:46
Twilight ends
18:16
Twilight begins
05:22


Waxing Crescent

8%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:39 10:39 15:38
Venus 06:39 11:33 16:28
Moon 09:11 14:09 19:11
Mars 07:16 12:09 17:01
Jupiter 18:17 01:23 08:29
Saturn 11:39 17:31 23:23
All times shown in PST.

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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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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