Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 3°52' to the south of Neptune.

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 15° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 17h14m00s 25°33'S Ophiuchus -4.2 17"7
Neptune 17h14m00s 21°40'S Ophiuchus 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Jul 2026

The sky on 22 July 2026
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
04:14


Waxing Gibbous

65%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 11:57 18:51
Venus 09:29 15:51 22:13
Moon 14:43 19:46 00:44
Mars 02:42 09:51 17:00
Jupiter 06:19 13:17 20:16
Saturn 23:35 05:47 11:59
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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