Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°08' to the north of Jupiter.

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:36 (EDT), 9° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 23 minutes after the Sun at 21:38.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair 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 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 06h07m20s 24°27'N Gemini -3.9 10"4
Jupiter 06h07m20s 23°19'N Gemini -1.9 31"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
05:12
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:01


Waxing Crescent

3%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:03 14:22 21:42
Venus 05:55 13:27 20:58
Moon 06:30 14:22 22:03
Mars 01:45 08:53 16:01
Jupiter 02:44 10:11 17:37
Saturn 23:23 05:03 10:44
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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