Conjunction of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Uranus will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°24' to the north of Uranus.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:58 (EST), 28° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 42 minutes after the Sun at 22:35.

Venus will be at mag -4.3, 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 02h06m40s 14°45'N Aries -4.3 20"2
Uranus 02h06m40s 12°20'N Aries 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Mar 2020

The sky on 9 March 2020
Sunrise
07:12
Sunset
18:53
Twilight ends
20:25
Twilight begins
05:40


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:14 11:40 17:05
Venus 08:51 15:48 22:44
Moon 17:42 00:40 07:26
Mars 04:12 08:47 13:23
Jupiter 04:30 09:12 13:53
Saturn 04:58 09:45 14:32
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

10 Jan 2020  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
15 Aug 2020  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
31 Oct 2020  –  Uranus at opposition
14 Jan 2021  –  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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