Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 22' to the north of Neptune.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:25 (PDT) – 3 hours and 4 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:26.

Venus will be at mag -4.1, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 13h47m10s 8°54'S Virgo -4.1 14"3
Neptune 13h47m10s 9°16'S Virgo 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2026

The sky on 4 July 2026
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waning Gibbous

72%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:52 13:45 20:38
Venus 09:03 15:48 22:33
Moon 22:45 04:18 09:58
Mars 03:06 10:08 17:11
Jupiter 07:10 14:12 21:13
Saturn 00:45 06:56 13:08
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

07 Jul 2119  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
01 Feb 2120  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
19 Apr 2120  –  Neptune at opposition
09 Jul 2120  –  Neptune 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