Close approach of Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 57.3 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 19:51 (PDT), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 58 minutes after the Sun at 21:50.

Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

They 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.

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 01h50m50s 11°53'N Aries -4.1 14"4
Uranus 01h52m20s 11°01'N Aries 5.9 3"4

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 21 Jun 2026

The sky on 21 June 2026
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:53


Waxing Gibbous

50%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:29 14:33 21:37
Venus 08:41 15:40 22:40
Moon 12:53 18:55 00:48
Mars 03:26 10:21 17:17
Jupiter 07:48 14:51 21:55
Saturn 01:34 07:45 13:56
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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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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