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 Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 2°09' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Ashburn however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -4.6, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.1, 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 134340 Pluto 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 19h51m40s 20°32'S Sagittarius -4.6 54"4
134340 Pluto 19h51m40s 22°41'S Sagittarius 15.1 0"0

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

The sky on 21 Dec 2021

The sky on 21 December 2021
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
16:50
Twilight ends
18:26
Twilight begins
05:46

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

89%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:27 13:01 17:36
Venus 09:07 13:59 18:51
Moon 17:58 01:47 09:33
Mars 05:32 10:22 15:12
Jupiter 10:50 16:10 21:30
Saturn 09:59 15:00 20:01
All times shown in EST.

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 Jul 2021  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
20 Jul 2022  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
22 Jul 2023  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
23 Jul 2024  –  134340 Pluto 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.

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39.04°N
77.49°W
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