Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 45' to the north of Neptune.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

Venus will be at mag -3.9, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 06h45m20s 22°52'N Gemini -3.9 10"5
Neptune 06h45m20s 22°07'N Gemini 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Apr 2026

The sky on 24 April 2026
Sunrise
06:08
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:00
Twilight begins
04:37


Waxing Gibbous

57%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:38 17:50
Venus 07:30 14:32 21:35
Moon 12:58 20:01 02:54
Mars 05:11 11:23 17:36
Jupiter 10:48 17:56 01:05
Saturn 05:08 11:14 17:20
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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