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 Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 29.4 arcminutes of each other.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 18:00 (PDT), 25° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 23 minutes after the Sun at 20:08.

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 -4.0; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or 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 Jupiter 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 00h44m20s 4°05'N Pisces -4.0 12"2
Jupiter 00h45m10s 3°39'N Pisces -2.1 33"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Mar 2023

The sky on 1 March 2023
Sunrise
06:14
Sunset
17:45
Twilight ends
19:07
Twilight begins
04:52

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

80%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:48 11:14 16:39
Venus 07:40 13:53 20:06
Moon 12:29 20:04 03:38
Mars 11:07 18:21 01:36
Jupiter 07:43 13:55 20:07
Saturn 05:48 11:17 16:46
All times shown in PST.

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

23 Nov 2022  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Sep 2023  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
02 Nov 2023  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Dec 2023  –  Jupiter 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.

Share

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme