Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 48' to the south 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 18° from it.

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

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 13h07m00s 6°13'S Virgo -3.9 10"4
Neptune 13h07m00s 5°25'S Virgo 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2026

The sky on 2 July 2026
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waning Gibbous

91%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:02 13:56 20:50
Venus 09:00 15:47 22:34
Moon 21:45 02:49 07:58
Mars 03:09 10:10 17:12
Jupiter 07:16 14:18 21:20
Saturn 00:52 07:04 13:16
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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