Conjunction of Venus and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°57' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

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 9° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 134340 Pluto 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 20h35m50s 20°33'S Capricornus -4.0 12"8
134340 Pluto 20h35m50s 23°30'S Capricornus 15.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Dec 2027

The sky on 24 December 2027
Sunrise
07:09
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:57
Twilight begins
05:27


Waning Crescent

5%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 12:14 16:36
Venus 09:23 14:06 18:49
Moon 04:22 08:54 13:22
Mars 08:33 13:07 17:40
Jupiter 23:10 05:22 11:35
Saturn 12:27 18:51 01:15
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.

Related news

29 Jul 2027  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
30 Jul 2028  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
01 Aug 2029  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
02 Aug 2030  –  134340 Pluto at opposition

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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