Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 52.0 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

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 Uranus 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 22h13m10s 12°43'S Aquarius -4.0 13"6
Uranus 22h11m50s 11°55'S Aquarius 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2025

The sky on 30 June 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56


Waxing Crescent

36%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 14:43 21:42
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:40
Moon 11:11 17:34 23:48
Mars 10:22 16:52 23:22
Jupiter 05:24 12:34 19:45
Saturn 00:26 06:25 12:24
All times shown in PDT.

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

08 Nov 2003  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
10 Jun 2004  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
27 Aug 2004  –  Uranus at opposition
11 Nov 2004  –  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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