Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°54' to the north of Neptune.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:09 (PDT), 22° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 55 minutes after the Sun at 22:04.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, 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 03h00m00s 18°10'N Aries -4.1 14"5
Neptune 03h00m00s 15°15'N Aries 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Mar 2026

The sky on 18 March 2026
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:01
Twilight ends
20:25
Twilight begins
05:32


Waxing Crescent

0%

0 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:00 11:44 17:28
Venus 07:46 14:02 20:19
Moon 06:44 12:45 18:55
Mars 06:22 12:03 17:44
Jupiter 13:00 20:09 03:19
Saturn 07:21 13:22 19:24
All times shown in PDT.

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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