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 53' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From London , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 16:20 (BST), 9° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 6 minutes after the Sun at 18:01.

The Moon will be at mag -9.7, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair 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.

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 19h55m50s 21°37'S Sagittarius -9.7 31'04"9
Venus 19h55m50s 22°31'S Sagittarius -3.9 11"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:09
Twilight ends
22:28
Twilight begins
03:28


Waning Crescent

20%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 11:19 17:23
Venus 04:28 10:36 16:43
Moon 04:22 09:10 14:13
Mars 11:05 19:10 03:16
Jupiter 07:55 16:07 00:19
Saturn 04:56 10:44 16:32
All times shown in BST.

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

21 Jan 1971  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
03 Apr 1972  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
07 Apr 1972  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
27 Aug 1972  –  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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