Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°03' to the south of Jupiter.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 16:48 (EDT), 18° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 43 minutes after the Sun at 19:12.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter 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 18h58m40s 25°00'S Sagittarius -4.1 15"1
Jupiter 18h58m40s 22°57'S Sagittarius -2.0 32"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 15 May 2024

The sky on 15 May 2024
Sunrise
05:32
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:59
Twilight begins
03:37


Waxing Gibbous

57%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:39 11:12 17:44
Venus 05:22 12:26 19:31
Moon 12:20 19:32 02:31
Mars 03:46 10:00 16:15
Jupiter 05:45 12:57 20:10
Saturn 02:54 08:34 14:14
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.

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03 Oct 1985  –  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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