Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°25' 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 14° from it.

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

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 21h09m20s 17°54'S Capricornus -3.9 10"2
Neptune 21h09m20s 16°28'S Capricornus 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Aug 2026

The sky on 9 August 2026
Sunrise
06:06
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:18
Twilight begins
04:33


Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:46 11:46 18:47
Venus 09:48 15:46 21:44
Moon 02:24 10:03 17:38
Mars 02:21 09:33 16:45
Jupiter 05:27 12:23 19:18
Saturn 22:25 04:36 10:48
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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