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 2°24' to the south 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 Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 16:40 (EDT), 19° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 18:58.

The Moon will be at mag -9.7, and Venus at mag -4.6, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 20h44m40s 19°33'S Capricornus -9.7 30'01"4
Venus 20h44m40s 17°08'S Capricornus -4.6 50"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 14 May 2024

The sky on 14 May 2024
Sunrise
05:21
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:56
Twilight begins
03:23


Waxing Crescent

47%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:30 11:03 17:35
Venus 05:11 12:17 19:23
Moon 11:03 18:39 02:02
Mars 03:39 09:53 16:07
Jupiter 05:36 12:52 20:07
Saturn 02:51 08:29 14:08
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.

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12 May 1983  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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