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 7'03" to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 29 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:58 (EDT) – 1 hour and 30 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 11° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h54m10s 10°16'S Virgo -8.7 32'44"7
Venus 13h54m10s 10°09'S Virgo -3.9 10"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2024

The sky on 17 July 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:22
Twilight begins
03:14


Waxing Gibbous

89%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:39 14:36 21:32
Venus 06:19 13:39 20:59
Moon 17:18 21:41 01:58
Mars 01:26 08:42 15:58
Jupiter 02:12 09:40 17:08
Saturn 22:43 04:23 10:03
All times shown in EDT.

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

06 Aug 1977  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
11 Jun 1978  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
29 Aug 1978  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
23 Dec 1978  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning 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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