Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 3°57' to the north of Neptune.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 18:09 (EST), 25° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 36 minutes after the Sun at 20:36.

Venus will be at mag -4.6, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 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 23h53m30s 1°52'N Pisces -4.6 33"2
Neptune 23h53m30s 2°04'S Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Feb 2025

The sky on 3 February 2025
Sunrise
06:53
Sunset
17:00
Twilight ends
18:36
Twilight begins
05:17


Waxing Crescent

38%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:54 11:42 16:30
Venus 08:31 14:40 20:50
Moon 09:32 16:19 23:21
Mars 14:22 22:12 06:03
Jupiter 11:56 19:24 02:52
Saturn 08:25 14:04 19:42
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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