Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 18' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 0° below the horizon at dawn.

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

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 23h14m10s 6°16'S Aquarius -3.9 12"5
Neptune 23h14m10s 5°58'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Apr 2019

The sky on 9 April 2019
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
19:26
Twilight ends
21:03
Twilight begins
04:45


Waxing Crescent

27%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:29 11:15 17:00
Venus 05:14 10:54 16:34
Moon 09:09 16:27 23:51
Mars 08:30 15:57 23:24
Jupiter 00:40 05:18 09:55
Saturn 02:26 07:09 11:52
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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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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