Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°03' to the south of Jupiter.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:56 (EST) – 3 hours and 56 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 39° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:34.

Venus will be at mag -4.4, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter 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 11h08m10s 5°32'N Leo -4.4 24"0
Jupiter 11h08m10s 6°36'N Leo -1.8 31"9

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

The sky on 21 Nov 2024

The sky on 21 November 2024
Sunrise
07:21
Sunset
17:10
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:46


Waning Gibbous

55%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:17 13:46 18:16
Venus 10:47 15:17 19:47
Moon 21:52 05:25 12:46
Mars 21:37 04:57 12:16
Jupiter 18:13 01:37 09:00
Saturn 13:51 19:24 00:57
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.

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07 Jan 2016  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 Mar 2016  –  Jupiter at opposition
09 May 2016  –  Jupiter 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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