The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within a mere 44.9 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.
From Fairfield , the trio will become visible at around 18:58 (EDT), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 51 minutes after the Sun at 22:31.
The Moon will be at mag -10.8; Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Mars will be at mag 1.6. The trio will lie in the constellation Taurus.
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 trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 04h50m00s | 26°09'N | Taurus | -10.8 | 32'44"5 |
| Venus | 04h53m00s | 26°29'N | Taurus | -4.4 | 26"8 |
| Mars | 04h56m20s | 23°44'N | Taurus | 1.6 | 4"3 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
The sky on 17 Jul 2024
| The sky on 17 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
87% 12 days old |
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
| 09 Sep 1971 | – Mars ends retrograde motion |
| 19 Sep 1973 | – Mars enters retrograde motion |
| 17 Oct 1973 | – Mars at perigee |
| 24 Oct 1973 | – Mars at opposition |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.