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 5°29' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:43 (EDT) – 3 hours and 6 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:30.

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

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 06h55m10s 27°09'N Gemini -10.2 30'43"2
Venus 06h55m10s 21°40'N Gemini -4.0 14"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 May 2025

The sky on 12 May 2025
Sunrise
05:23
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:52
Twilight begins
03:27


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:46 11:29 18:11
Venus 03:38 09:50 16:03
Moon 19:22 00:10 04:51
Mars 10:57 18:15 01:33
Jupiter 07:17 14:52 22:27
Saturn 03:26 09:20 15:14
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

05 Aug 1985  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
10 Jun 1986  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
26 Aug 1986  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
21 Dec 1986  –  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.

Share