Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 41' to the north of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h45m50s 19°58'S Sagittarius -4.1 16"6
Neptune 19h45m50s 20°39'S Sagittarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Oct 2024

The sky on 3 October 2024
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
18:30
Twilight ends
20:02
Twilight begins
05:17


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 12:49 18:38
Venus 09:35 14:40 19:46
Moon 07:34 13:15 18:47
Mars 23:40 07:11 14:42
Jupiter 21:55 05:23 12:51
Saturn 17:30 23:03 04:37
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

02 Oct 1994  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
27 Apr 1995  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
17 Jul 1995  –  Neptune at opposition
04 Oct 1995  –  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.

Share