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 Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The planets Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 43.7 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:52 (PDT), 26° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 31 minutes after the Sun at 20:19.

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Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

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 Uranus 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 22h11m30s 12°43'S Aquarius -4.2 18"0
Uranus 22h10m20s 12°03'S Aquarius 5.9 3"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Aug 2026

The sky on 11 August 2026
Sunrise
06:08
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:15
Twilight begins
04:35

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:53 18:52
Venus 09:50 15:45 21:41
Moon 04:50 12:06 19:13
Mars 02:19 09:31 16:43
Jupiter 05:22 12:17 19:12
Saturn 22:17 04:28 10:39
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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

10 Nov 2171  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
12 Jun 2172  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
29 Aug 2172  –  Uranus at opposition
13 Nov 2172  –  Uranus 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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
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34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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