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 1°18' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:02 (PDT) – 3 hours and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 27° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:24.

Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h05m20s 4°51'S Virgo -4.2 16"9
Uranus 13h03m30s 6°04'S Virgo 5.5 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2026

The sky on 6 July 2026
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00


Waning Gibbous

58%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 13:33 20:25
Venus 09:06 15:49 22:31
Moon 23:37 05:44 11:59
Mars 03:03 10:07 17:10
Jupiter 07:05 14:06 21:07
Saturn 00:37 06:49 13:01
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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21 Jun 2056  –  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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