Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 32' to the south of Jupiter.

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

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h07m20s 11°14'N Aries -3.9 10"7
Jupiter 02h07m20s 11°46'N Aries -2.1 32"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 May 2035

The sky on 17 May 2035
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
20:40
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
04:21


Waxing Gibbous

85%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:47 14:10 21:33
Venus 05:17 11:58 18:40
Moon 16:23 22:32 04:33
Mars 02:24 07:30 12:37
Jupiter 05:15 11:58 18:41
Saturn 10:42 17:59 01:16
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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