Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 1°50' of each other.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 16:42 (EST), 23° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 18 minutes after the Sun at 19:41.

Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 20h15m40s 22°14'S Capricornus -4.2 18"4
Jupiter 20h13m50s 20°26'S Capricornus -2.0 33"5

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

The sky on 8 Dec 2032

The sky on 8 December 2032
Sunrise
07:03
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:02
Twilight begins
05:24


Waxing Crescent

38%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:31 10:27 15:23
Venus 10:17 14:58 19:38
Moon 11:19 17:02 22:53
Mars 02:38 08:12 13:46
Jupiter 10:07 14:54 19:42
Saturn 17:34 01:02 08:30
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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