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 50' 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 8° above the horizon at dusk.

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

The pair 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.

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 22h32m40s 10°46'S Aquarius -3.9 11"0
Neptune 22h32m40s 9°56'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Jun 2024

The sky on 26 June 2024
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:51

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

73%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:06 13:46 21:25
Venus 05:33 13:12 20:50
Moon 23:29 04:41 10:05
Mars 02:06 09:05 16:03
Jupiter 03:19 10:44 18:08
Saturn 00:06 05:47 11:27
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

16 Nov 2014  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
12 Jun 2015  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
31 Aug 2015  –  Neptune at opposition
18 Nov 2015  –  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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