Conjunction of Venus and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 6°33' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

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 16° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.5, and 134340 Pluto at mag 14.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and 134340 Pluto 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 18h40m50s 26°49'S Sagittarius -4.5 29"7
134340 Pluto 18h40m50s 20°15'S Sagittarius 14.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Oct 2024

The sky on 20 October 2024
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
17:53
Twilight ends
19:27
Twilight begins
05:27


Waning Gibbous

81%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:12 13:16 18:20
Venus 10:11 14:48 19:25
Moon 19:09 03:01 11:04
Mars 22:59 06:31 14:02
Jupiter 20:35 04:07 11:39
Saturn 16:13 21:44 03:15
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

01 Jul 2013  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
04 Jul 2014  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
06 Jul 2015  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
07 Jul 2016  –  134340 Pluto at opposition

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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