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°09' to the south of Neptune.

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 17° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h05m30s 13°28'S Aquarius -4.0 13"6
Neptune 22h05m30s 12°18'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

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 28 Nov 2024

The sky on 28 November 2024
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:08


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 12:35 17:02
Venus 10:12 14:38 19:04
Moon 04:19 09:25 14:23
Mars 20:20 03:46 11:13
Jupiter 16:47 00:18 07:49
Saturn 12:38 18:09 23:40
All times shown in EST.

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

09 Nov 2011  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
04 Jun 2012  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
24 Aug 2012  –  Neptune at opposition
11 Nov 2012  –  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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