Conjunction of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°09' to the south of Uranus.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 3° below the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Uranus at mag 5.9, both in the constellation Aries.

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 Uranus 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 02h06m20s 11°08'N Aries -3.9 10"9
Uranus 02h06m20s 12°17'N Aries 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 18 May 2019

The sky on 18 May 2019
Sunrise
05:30
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
22:03
Twilight begins
03:34


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:22 12:34 19:45
Venus 04:33 11:16 18:00
Moon 18:52 00:16 05:32
Mars 07:36 15:14 22:52
Jupiter 21:57 02:35 07:13
Saturn 23:53 04:36 09:18
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

06 Jan 2019  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
11 Aug 2019  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
28 Oct 2019  –  Uranus at opposition
10 Jan 2020  –  Uranus 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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