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 4°43' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 19° from it.

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Venus will be at mag -3.9, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.3, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h59m20s 18°42'S Capricornus -3.9 10"6
134340 Pluto 20h59m20s 23°26'S Capricornus 15.3 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jan 2031

The sky on 12 January 2031
Sunrise
07:09
Sunset
16:31
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:29

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 10:17 14:51
Venus 08:25 13:16 18:08
Moon 19:47 02:22 08:48
Mars 00:34 06:03 11:33
Jupiter 04:46 09:22 13:58
Saturn 13:01 20:16 03:31
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

02 Aug 2030  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
04 Aug 2031  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
05 Aug 2032  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
07 Aug 2033  –  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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