The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 1°51' of each other. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 16:59 (PDT), 14° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 44 minutes after the Sun at 18:26.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6; and Venus will be at mag -3.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or 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 the Moon and Venus 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
The Moon 18h14m30s 22°56'S Sagittarius -9.6 31'12"5
Venus 18h13m50s 24°47'S Sagittarius -3.9 11"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 27° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2019

The sky on 28 November 2019
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
16:42
Twilight ends
18:09
Twilight begins
05:01

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

8%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 10:16 15:41
Venus 08:38 13:32 18:26
Moon 08:30 13:39 18:46
Mars 04:05 09:34 15:03
Jupiter 08:14 13:13 18:12
Saturn 09:32 14:34 19:36
All times shown in PST.

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

05 Jan 2019  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
24 Mar 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
25 Mar 2020  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
13 Aug 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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