Venus at perihelion

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Inner Planets feed


Objects: Venus

Venus's 225-day orbit around the Sun will carry it to its closest point to the Sun – its perihelion – at a distance of 0.72 AU from the Sun.

In practice, however, Venus's orbit is very close to circular; its distance from the Sun varies by only about 1.5% between perihelion and aphelion. This makes Venus's orbit more perfectly circular than that of any of the Solar System's other planets. As a result, its surface receives almost exactly the same amount of energy from the Sun at perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) and aphelion (furthest recess from the Sun).

The position of Venus at the moment it passes perihelion will be:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Angular Size
Venus 13h19m50s 6°13'S Virgo 17.1"
Sun 16h06m 20°52'S Scorpius 32'24"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

From South El Monte, Venus will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:04 (PDT) – 3 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:14.

The sky on 14 Aug 2025

The sky on 14 August 2025
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:38


Waning Gibbous

57%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:34
Venus 03:25 10:30 17:35
Moon 22:17 05:01 11:55
Mars 09:36 15:35 21:34
Jupiter 03:11 10:20 17:28
Saturn 21:28 03:26 09:23
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

19 Oct 2039  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
05 Jan 2041  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
26 Jan 2041  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
26 May 2041  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

Image credit

© NASA/Ricardo Nunes

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