Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°41' of each other.
From Washington, the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:56 (MDT) – 2 hours and 21 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks around 05:57.
Venus will be at mag -4.3, and Uranus at mag 5.9, both in the constellation Pisces.
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.
At around the same time, the two objects will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.
A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Uranus around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the two objects at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| Venus | 01h42m30s | +08°13' | Pisces | -4.3 | 23"9 |
| Uranus | 01h40m30s | +09°49' | Pisces | 5.9 | 3"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
| The sky on 02 June 2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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66% 8 days old |
All times shown in MDT.
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Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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
| 15 Oct 2016 | – Uranus at opposition |
| 19 Oct 2017 | – Uranus at opposition |
| 23 Oct 2018 | – Uranus at opposition |
| 28 Oct 2019 | – Uranus at opposition |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.