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 50' to the north of Neptune.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 18° from it.

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Venus will be at mag -3.9, 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 01h11m00s 6°39'N Pisces -3.9 10"4
Neptune 01h11m00s 5°49'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Mar 2034

The sky on 21 March 2034
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
18:56
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:09

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:00 11:21 16:43
Venus 07:30 13:58 20:26
Moon 07:32 13:59 20:36
Mars 08:34 15:45 22:56
Jupiter 06:32 12:20 18:09
Saturn 12:13 19:46 03:19
All times shown in EDT.

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

28 Dec 2033  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
25 Jul 2034  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
14 Oct 2034  –  Neptune at opposition
30 Dec 2034  –  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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