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 31' to the south of Neptune.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 20° from it.

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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 22h47m30s 9°04'S Aquarius -3.9 10"6
Neptune 22h47m30s 8°32'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Mar 2016

The sky on 20 March 2016
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:38
Twilight begins
05:21

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

94%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:56 12:50 18:44
Venus 06:15 11:46 17:17
Moon 16:34 23:20 05:58
Mars 00:21 05:10 10:00
Jupiter 17:46 00:13 06:39
Saturn 01:15 06:00 10:45
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

18 Nov 2015  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
13 Jun 2016  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
02 Sep 2016  –  Neptune at opposition
19 Nov 2016  –  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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41.14°N
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