Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 18' 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 20° from it.

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

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 02h33m30s 13°34'N Aries -3.9 10"5
Neptune 02h33m30s 13°15'N Aries 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2024

The sky on 25 July 2024
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
03:26


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:32 21:13
Venus 06:38 13:47 20:56
Moon 22:20 04:15 10:24
Mars 01:12 08:33 15:55
Jupiter 01:47 09:15 16:44
Saturn 22:12 03:51 09:30
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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