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.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 18° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Uranus at mag 5.9, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h11m50s 12°51'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 2 Oct 2024

The sky on 2 October 2024
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
18:23
Twilight ends
19:56
Twilight begins
05:06


Waxing Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:47 12:39 18:30
Venus 09:27 14:31 19:36
Moon 06:25 12:27 18:19
Mars 23:29 07:04 14:40
Jupiter 21:46 05:18 12:50
Saturn 17:26 22:59 04:31
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

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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