Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°21' of each other.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 9° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Uranus 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 08h51m30s 19°40'N Cancer -4.0 15"4
Uranus 08h49m50s 18°22'N Cancer 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
03:40


Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:00 14:43 21:25
Venus 06:45 13:54 21:03
Moon 21:35 02:43 08:00
Mars 01:27 08:44 16:01
Jupiter 02:06 09:30 16:54
Saturn 22:27 04:08 09:48
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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20 Apr 2043  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion

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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