Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 39' to the north of Jupiter.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:44 (EDT) – 2 hours and 41 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:07.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 Jupiter 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 13h00m30s 4°34'S Virgo -4.0 12"4
Jupiter 13h00m30s 5°14'S Virgo -1.7 30"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Nov 2028

The sky on 9 November 2028
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
04:48


Waning Crescent

45%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:54 11:03 16:12
Venus 03:40 09:27 15:13
Moon 22:00 05:19 12:26
Mars 00:33 07:12 13:51
Jupiter 03:43 09:27 15:11
Saturn 16:01 22:45 05:30
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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