Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 1°24' of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 16:34 (EDT), 10° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 37 minutes after the Sun at 17:52.

Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 17h50m30s 24°40'S Sagittarius -3.9 11"3
Jupiter 17h50m50s 23°16'S Sagittarius -1.9 31"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2019

The sky on 24 November 2019
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:01 10:14 15:28
Venus 08:57 13:22 17:46
Moon 04:03 09:48 15:23
Mars 04:17 09:36 14:55
Jupiter 08:50 13:21 17:53
Saturn 10:08 14:44 19:20
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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12 Sep 2020  –  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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