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 17.7 arcminutes of each other.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dawn.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. 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 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 00h46m20s 3°03'N Pisces -4.0 15"1
Neptune 00h46m00s 3°20'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 12 May 2030

The sky on 12 May 2030
Sunrise
05:23
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:27

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

78%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:39 11:12 17:45
Venus 03:54 10:07 16:21
Moon 14:29 20:38 02:36
Mars 05:34 12:51 20:08
Jupiter 19:48 00:45 05:43
Saturn 05:52 13:03 20:14
All times shown in EDT.

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

19 Dec 2029  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
16 Jul 2030  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
04 Oct 2030  –  Neptune at opposition
21 Dec 2030  –  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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