Close approach of Venus and Collinder 50

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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Venus and Collinder 50 will make a close approach, passing within 1°18' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:10 (PST) – 2 hours and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:06.

Venus will be at mag -4.5; and Collinder 50 will be at mag 1.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

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.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Collinder 50 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 04h26m10s 17°17'N Taurus -4.5 33"9
Collinder 50 04h27m00s 16°00'N Taurus 1.0 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Nov 2025

The sky on 20 November 2025
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
04:59


Waxing Crescent

0%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 11:32 16:42
Venus 05:33 10:51 16:10
Moon 07:06 11:56 16:43
Mars 07:33 12:30 17:28
Jupiter 20:35 03:39 10:43
Saturn 13:44 19:35 01:26
All times shown in PST.

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.

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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