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°18' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 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 03:14 (EDT) – 1 hour and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:45.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Aries.

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 03h22m30s 14°15'N Aries -10.2 32'52"6
Venus 03h22m30s 16°33'N Aries -4.0 13"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 21 May 2024

The sky on 21 May 2024
Sunrise
05:14
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
03:12


Waxing Gibbous

99%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:24 11:10 17:56
Venus 05:08 12:24 19:40
Moon 18:26 23:27 04:21
Mars 03:23 09:45 16:07
Jupiter 05:14 12:31 19:48
Saturn 02:24 08:04 13:43
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.

Related news

01 Apr 1982  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
09 Jul 1982  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
12 May 1983  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
16 Jun 1983  –  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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