Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 5'43" to the north of Neptune.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 12° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h58m40s 4°43'N Pisces -3.9 9"9
Neptune 00h58m40s 4°37'N Pisces 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Apr 2032

The sky on 17 April 2032
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
20:11
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
05:10


Waxing Gibbous

52%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:56 11:52 17:48
Venus 06:27 12:46 19:05
Moon 12:50 19:57 02:57
Mars 07:54 15:02 22:10
Jupiter 03:05 07:56 12:47
Saturn 09:36 16:57 00:19
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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