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 4°44' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:44 (EDT) – 2 hours and 2 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:28.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6 in Capricornus; and Venus will be at mag -4.5 in Aquarius.

They 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.

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 21h11m00s 18°26'S Capricornus -10.6 30'25"4
Venus 21h06m40s 13°48'S Aquarius -4.5 28"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Apr 2024

The sky on 27 April 2024
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:27
Twilight begins
03:54


Waning Gibbous

82%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:01 11:21 17:40
Venus 05:25 12:03 18:41
Moon 22:55 03:15 07:31
Mars 04:17 10:12 16:07
Jupiter 06:31 13:42 20:54
Saturn 03:54 09:31 15:08
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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