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 Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Venus and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 58' to the north of Neptune.

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 15° above the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Neptune at mag 7.9, 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 through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Neptune 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 00h44m20s 4°07'N Pisces -4.0 12"3
Neptune 00h44m20s 3°08'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Mar 2031

The sky on 1 March 2031
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
17:32
Twilight ends
19:06
Twilight begins
04:44

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

60%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:43 12:26 18:08
Venus 07:32 13:50 20:08
Moon 10:46 18:20 01:53
Mars 23:03 04:09 09:15
Jupiter 02:15 06:48 11:22
Saturn 09:52 17:08 00:24
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.

Related news

21 Dec 2030  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
19 Jul 2031  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
07 Oct 2031  –  Neptune at opposition
24 Dec 2031  –  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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