Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 58' to the north of Jupiter.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 17:57 (EDT), 26° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 47 minutes after the Sun at 20:27.

Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter 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 01h19m00s 8°09'N Pisces -4.0 12"9
Jupiter 01h19m00s 7°10'N Pisces -2.1 33"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 18 May 2024

The sky on 18 May 2024
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
22:03
Twilight begins
03:16


Waxing Gibbous

78%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:26 11:06 17:46
Venus 05:09 12:21 19:33
Moon 15:14 21:22 03:19
Mars 03:30 09:48 16:07
Jupiter 05:23 12:40 19:57
Saturn 02:36 08:15 13:54
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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