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 34.1 arcminutes of each other.

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 19° above the horizon at dusk.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h57m50s 8°01'S Aquarius -4.0 13"1
Uranus 22h56m50s 7°30'S Aquarius 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Aug 2026

The sky on 13 August 2026
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:12
Twilight begins
04:37


Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:02 12:00 18:58
Venus 09:52 15:44 21:37
Moon 07:14 13:52 20:20
Mars 02:16 09:29 16:41
Jupiter 05:16 12:11 19:06
Saturn 22:09 04:20 10:31
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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