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 23' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

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

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.2, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 05h42m00s 24°29'N Taurus -8.2 33'22"1
Venus 05h42m00s 24°05'N Taurus -3.9 10"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
07:24
Sunset
17:09
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:48


Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:12 13:43 18:13
Venus 10:48 15:19 19:50
Moon 00:03 06:55 13:36
Mars 21:31 04:51 12:10
Jupiter 18:04 01:28 08:51
Saturn 13:43 19:16 00:49
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

10 Sep 1972  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
13 Nov 1973  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
20 Dec 1973  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
04 Apr 1974  –  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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