Conjunction of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°08' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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 02:38 (EDT) – 3 hours and 43 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 36° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair 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.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus 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
The Moon 07h40m30s 17°30'N Gemini -10.7 32'53"7
Venus 07h40m30s 18°38'N Gemini -4.3 23"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Aug 2024

The sky on 16 August 2024
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
04:17


Waxing Gibbous

89%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 13:06 19:35
Venus 07:43 14:13 20:43
Moon 18:09 22:31 02:57
Mars 00:49 08:17 15:46
Jupiter 00:47 08:13 15:40
Saturn 20:50 02:29 08:07
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.

Related news

01 Sep 1956  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
13 Sep 1956  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
18 Nov 1957  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
24 Dec 1957  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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