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 Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 32' to the north of Jupiter.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:01 (EDT), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 29 minutes after the Sun at 20:13.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter 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 00h45m20s 4°12'N Pisces -4.0 12"2
Jupiter 00h45m20s 3°40'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 2 Mar 2023

The sky on 2 March 2023
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
17:44
Twilight ends
19:15
Twilight begins
04:52

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

81%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 11:20 16:34
Venus 07:40 13:58 20:16
Moon 12:51 20:53 04:49
Mars 10:42 18:24 02:06
Jupiter 07:41 13:57 20:13
Saturn 06:02 11:19 16:35
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.

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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.

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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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