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 33' to the south 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:17 (EDT) – 2 hours and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:42.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h35m10s 21°10'N Gemini -4.0 12"6
Jupiter 07h35m10s 21°44'N Gemini -1.9 32"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 4 May 2024

The sky on 4 May 2024
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
03:56

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:55 11:14 17:34
Venus 05:29 12:17 19:05
Moon 03:53 09:47 15:53
Mars 04:10 10:13 16:16
Jupiter 06:20 13:30 20:40
Saturn 03:36 09:14 14:53
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.

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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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