Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°25' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

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

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 21h24m20s 16°52'S Capricornus -3.9 10"6
Neptune 21h24m20s 15°27'S Capricornus 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jul 2024

The sky on 8 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
03:20


Waxing Crescent

13%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:20 14:33 21:47
Venus 06:10 13:37 21:03
Moon 07:51 15:19 22:35
Mars 01:54 09:00 16:06
Jupiter 02:54 10:16 17:39
Saturn 23:27 05:08 10:49
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.

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13 Aug 2007  –  Neptune at opposition
31 Oct 2007  –  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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