Categories: Live BroadcastsVenus

Watch Live Webcast of Venus-Pleiades Conjunction April 4, 2012

There’s a nice meetup in the heavens tonight: bright Venus is snuggling up to one of the most famous star clusters, the Pleiades. The Slooh Space Camera is broadcasting a live, real-time feed of the most famous star cluster in the heavens, the Pleiades, meeting up with our nearest and brightest planetary neighbor, Venus. Slooh’s coverage will begin on Wednesday, April 4th starting at 1:30 PM PDT / 4:30 PM EDT / 20:30 UT. (This was originally scheduled for April 3rd, but was rescheduled due to high humidity at Canary Islands observatory off the coast of Africa.) The broadcast can be watched here, or accessed at Slooh’s homepage or by visiting Slooh’s G+ page, where you will be able to see the panel interact live via G+ Hangouts On Air.

If skies are clear, you can see the conjunction for yourself by looking toward the west in the constellation Taurus, after sunset, using binoculars. If you can get images of the event, we’ll post views of them. Share them on Universe Today’s Flickr page.

Here’s some information about the conjunction from Slooh:

The Pleiades, otherwise known as the Seven Sisters, is a beautiful bright blue open star cluster 440 light years from Earth. The relative tightness of the cluster is indicative of its young age as the member stars were formed some 100 million years ago and will probably travel together through space as a bound cluster for another 250 million years before the gravity of the Milky Way breaks up the cluster into individual field stars. The central core radius of the cluster is only about 4.5 light years but the remote outer regions of the cluster may extend out as far as 52 light years from the center. The brighter members of the cluster, which make up the Seven Sisters, are blue stars with surface temperatures of about 20,000 degrees which is four times hotter than our own Sun.

Venus is sometimes called the Earth’s sister planet because they are so close in size. However, Venus is very different in many ways, with an atmosphere almost 100 times thicker than Earth’s, and is composed of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide. Even though it is only slightly closer to the Sun, the surface of Venus averages 900 degrees making it the hottest place in the solar system outside the Sun itself.

While Venus and Pleiades are hundreds of light years apart, they will appear together as neighbors in the same field of view. Venus will pass just below the bright blue star cluster. This incredible event happens only once every eight years.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Recent Posts

New Research Suggests Io Doesn’t Have a Shallow Ocean of Magma

Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with roughly…

14 hours ago

The Mysterious Case of the Resurrected Star

The star HD 65907 is not what it appears to be. It’s a star that…

14 hours ago

The JWST Looked Over the Hubble’s Shoulder and Confirmed that the Universe is Expanding Faster

It's axiomatic that the Universe is expanding. However, the rate of expansion hasn't remained the…

19 hours ago

Astronaut Don Pettit is Serious, He Rigged up Astrophotography Gear on the ISS

Don Pettit is one of the astronauts currently on board the International Space Station. He's…

23 hours ago

Drone Test Flights Are Being Tested for Flights on Alien Worlds

We’ve already seen the success of the Ingenuity probe on Mars. The first aircraft to…

24 hours ago

One of the Most Interesting Exoplanets Just Got Even More Interesting!

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992, thousands more have been discovered. 40…

1 day ago