Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°16' of each other.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 8° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

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 15h24m20s 19°43'S Libra -4.0 13"5
Uranus 15h26m00s 18°30'S Libra 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Aug 2026

The sky on 1 August 2026
Sunrise
06:00
Sunset
19:52
Twilight ends
21:28
Twilight begins
04:24


Waning Gibbous

90%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:35 11:35 18:35
Venus 09:41 15:49 21:58
Moon 21:16 03:00 08:53
Mars 02:30 09:41 16:52
Jupiter 05:50 12:47 19:44
Saturn 22:56 05:08 11:20
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.

Related news

30 Jul 2064  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
05 Mar 2065  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
19 May 2065  –  Uranus at opposition
04 Aug 2065  –  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.

Share