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

Conjunction of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°21' to the south of Neptune.

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 4° above the horizon at dusk.

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

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

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 18h29m50s 24°39'S Sagittarius -3.9 11"3
Neptune 18h29m50s 22°17'S Sagittarius 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2024

The sky on 11 October 2024
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
18:08
Twilight ends
19:41
Twilight begins
05:16

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

67%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:32 12:58 18:25
Venus 09:49 14:39 19:29
Moon 15:17 19:49 00:27
Mars 23:15 06:48 14:22
Jupiter 21:11 04:43 12:15
Saturn 16:50 22:21 03:53
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

17 Sep 1987  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
11 Apr 1988  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
30 Jun 1988  –  Neptune at opposition
18 Sep 1988  –  Neptune 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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