Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 31.7 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:48 (PDT), 14° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 35 minutes after the Sun at 19:07.

The Moon will be at mag -9.0; and Venus will be at mag -3.9. 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 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 22h45m20s 8°54'S Aquarius -9.0 31'44"0
Venus 22h46m20s 9°22'S Aquarius -3.9 10"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 20° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jun 2025

The sky on 7 June 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
03:54


Waxing Gibbous

90%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:16 13:34 20:51
Venus 03:17 09:46 16:15
Moon 17:09 22:21 03:28
Mars 10:50 17:34 00:17
Jupiter 06:31 13:42 20:53
Saturn 01:54 07:52 13:50
All times shown in PDT.

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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06 Nov 1951  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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