Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°58' to the north of Neptune.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:44 (EDT), 27° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 21:16.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 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 01h24m30s 10°05'N Pisces -4.2 19"2
Neptune 01h24m30s 7°07'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

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

The sky on 6 Jul 2024

The sky on 6 July 2024
Sunrise
05:24
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:33
Twilight begins
03:18


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 14:29 21:47
Venus 06:06 13:34 21:02
Moon 05:36 13:39 21:34
Mars 01:58 09:02 16:07
Jupiter 03:00 10:22 17:45
Saturn 23:35 05:16 10:57
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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