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 3°29' to the south of 134340 Pluto.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 15° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 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 19h07m00s 24°56'S Sagittarius -4.1 16"1
134340 Pluto 19h07m00s 21°27'S Sagittarius 15.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2016

The sky on 24 November 2016
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:12


Waning Crescent

12%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:16 12:43 17:10
Venus 10:13 14:40 19:08
Moon 02:06 08:12 14:11
Mars 11:38 16:32 21:26
Jupiter 02:50 08:36 14:21
Saturn 07:56 12:39 17:22
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

07 Jul 2016  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
10 Jul 2017  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
12 Jul 2018  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
14 Jul 2019  –  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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