Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°34' to the north of Neptune.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 21° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Neptune at mag 7.9, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h18m20s 13°35'N Aries -3.9 10"8
Neptune 02h18m20s 12°00'N Aries 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
03:23


Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:34 21:19
Venus 06:33 13:45 20:57
Moon 21:30 02:34 07:48
Mars 01:15 08:35 15:56
Jupiter 01:53 09:21 16:50
Saturn 22:20 03:59 09:39
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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