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 26.4 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 13° above the horizon at dusk.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 16h17m00s 20°49'S Scorpius -2.0 33"9
Uranus 16h16m40s 21°15'S Scorpius 5.7 3"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:42
Twilight begins
04:55

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

85%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 13:49 20:39
Venus 06:00 11:45 17:29
Moon 21:41 02:49 07:48
Mars 05:22 10:44 16:05
Jupiter 08:10 15:13 22:17
Saturn 05:45 11:17 16:50
All times shown in EDT.

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

14 Aug 1983  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
18 Mar 1984  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
01 Jun 1984  –  Uranus at opposition
18 Aug 1984  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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