Close approach of Venus and Collinder 50

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

Venus and Collinder 50 will make a close approach, passing within 1°13' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:27 (PDT) – 2 hours and 18 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:04.

Venus will be at mag -4.5; and Collinder 50 will be at mag 1.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

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.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Collinder 50 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 04h26m30s 17°13'N Taurus -4.5 38"8
Collinder 50 04h27m00s 16°00'N Taurus 1.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2020

The sky on 7 July 2020
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
04:01


Waning Gibbous

91%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:17 12:12 19:08
Venus 03:23 10:14 17:06
Moon 21:48 02:53 08:02
Mars 00:13 06:13 12:13
Jupiter 20:27 01:28 06:28
Saturn 20:50 01:55 06:59
All times shown in PDT.

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.

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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