The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 45.2 arcminutes of each other.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:22 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 33° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:30.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 Jupiter 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
Jupiter 16h30m00s 20°57'S Ophiuchus -2.0 35"3
Uranus 16h29m40s 21°42'S Ophiuchus 5.6 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:39
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:15

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:16 13:52 20:29
Venus 05:59 11:49 17:39
Moon 21:33 02:59 08:18
Mars 05:14 10:48 16:21
Jupiter 08:32 15:17 22:02
Saturn 05:40 11:21 17:02
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 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

09 Aug 1982  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
14 Mar 1983  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
28 May 1983  –  Uranus at opposition
13 Aug 1983  –  Uranus 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.

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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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