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°00' to the north of Neptune.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 17° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0 in the constellation Aries, and Neptune at mag 7.9 in the neighbouring constellation of 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 01h51m00s 11°36'N Aries -4.0 13"2
Neptune 01h51m00s 9°36'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2024

The sky on 2 July 2024
Sunrise
05:09
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
02:55


Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:39 14:09 21:38
Venus 05:45 13:20 20:55
Moon 01:56 09:40 17:38
Mars 01:54 08:58 16:02
Jupiter 03:00 10:26 17:51
Saturn 23:43 05:23 11:04
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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