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 56.5 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 26 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:37 (EST) – 2 hours and 56 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 32° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:17.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Venus will be at mag -4.1. Both objects 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 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 04h20m50s 17°49'N Taurus -10.4 29'26"7
Venus 04h20m30s 18°45'N Taurus -4.1 18"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
17:26
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:32


Waning Crescent

42%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:38 13:37 18:36
Venus 10:15 15:14 20:13
Moon 00:11 06:49 13:20
Mars 21:50 04:45 11:41
Jupiter 18:24 01:22 08:21
Saturn 13:29 19:11 00:52
All times shown in EST.

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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26 Jun 1978  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
29 Aug 1978  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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