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

Close approach of Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within a mere 0.4 arcminutes of each other.

From San Diego however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 9° above the horizon at dawn.

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 -4.1; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Neptune around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 23h40m20s 3°22'S Aquarius -4.1 17"1
Neptune 23h40m20s 3°21'S Aquarius 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Apr 2022

The sky on 27 April 2022
Sunrise
06:03
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:34

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:59 14:03 21:07
Venus 04:12 10:06 16:00
Moon 04:35 10:33 16:39
Mars 03:33 09:11 14:49
Jupiter 04:19 10:16 16:13
Saturn 02:47 08:12 13:36
All times shown in PDT.

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.

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27 Jun 2022  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
16 Sep 2022  –  Neptune at opposition
03 Dec 2022  –  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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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