Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 29.8 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:08 (EDT) – 3 hours and 25 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:27.

Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 09h47m10s 13°33'N Leo -4.1 15"2
Uranus 09h47m50s 14°01'N Leo 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jul 2024

The sky on 27 July 2024
Sunrise
05:29
Sunset
20:08
Twilight ends
22:07
Twilight begins
03:30


Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:52 14:29 21:06
Venus 06:43 13:49 20:55
Moon 23:04 05:53 12:56
Mars 01:08 08:31 15:54
Jupiter 01:40 09:09 16:38
Saturn 22:04 03:43 09:22
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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