Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 8.0 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:54 (EDT), 21° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 16 minutes after the Sun at 19:53.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or 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 Jupiter 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 00h10m20s 0°03'N Pisces -4.0 11"6
Jupiter 00h10m40s 0°03'S Pisces -2.1 33"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Jun 2024

The sky on 29 June 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12


Waning Crescent

36%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 14:07 21:38
Venus 05:52 13:24 20:57
Moon 00:47 07:15 13:57
Mars 02:11 09:10 16:09
Jupiter 03:22 10:44 18:05
Saturn 00:02 05:44 11:25
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

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24 Aug 1999  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
23 Oct 1999  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Dec 1999  –  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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