Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 47" to the south of Neptune.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, 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 23h38m50s 3°34'S Aquarius -4.0 11"6
Neptune 23h38m50s 3°33'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Feb 2023

The sky on 15 February 2023
Sunrise
06:39
Sunset
17:15
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Crescent

24%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:50 10:36 15:21
Venus 07:51 13:42 19:32
Moon 02:59 07:17 11:30
Mars 11:06 18:50 02:35
Jupiter 08:24 14:35 20:47
Saturn 06:50 12:02 17:14
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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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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