Conjunction of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 56' to the south of Uranus.

From Jacksonville however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Uranus at mag 5.8, 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 Uranus 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 17h40m40s 24°28'S Ophiuchus -3.9 11"0
Uranus 17h40m40s 23°31'S Ophiuchus 5.8 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2024

The sky on 11 October 2024
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
18:59
Twilight ends
20:19
Twilight begins
06:03


Waxing Gibbous

69%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:01 13:40 19:19
Venus 10:05 15:21 20:37
Moon 15:23 20:33 01:47
Mars 00:31 07:30 14:30
Jupiter 22:26 05:25 12:24
Saturn 17:21 23:03 04:46
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.

Related news

01 Sep 1987  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
04 Apr 1988  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
20 Jun 1988  –  Uranus at opposition
05 Sep 1988  –  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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