Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°03' to the north of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.5, 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 00h05m00s 1°12'N Pisces -4.5 34"7
Neptune 00h05m00s 0°50'S Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 3 May 2025

The sky on 3 May 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
19:51
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
03:58


Waxing Gibbous

50%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:00 11:20 17:39
Venus 04:02 10:10 16:17
Moon 10:53 18:41 02:17
Mars 11:22 18:42 02:02
Jupiter 07:58 15:28 22:58
Saturn 04:07 10:01 15:54
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.

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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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