Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 30' to the south of Neptune.

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 5° above the horizon at dawn.

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

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 20h29m30s 19°16'S Capricornus -3.9 11"6
Neptune 20h29m30s 18°46'S Capricornus 8.0 2"2

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 15 Aug 2024

The sky on 15 August 2024
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
05:24


Waxing Gibbous

86%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:26 13:46 20:06
Venus 08:24 14:46 21:07
Moon 17:08 22:05 03:04
Mars 01:53 08:52 15:51
Jupiter 01:52 08:50 15:48
Saturn 21:20 03:06 08:53
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

13 Oct 1999  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
08 May 2000  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
27 Jul 2000  –  Neptune at opposition
15 Oct 2000  –  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.

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