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 6°18' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:23 (PDT) – 3 hours and 34 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 32° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:40.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8; and Venus will be at mag -4.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

They 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.

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 15h07m50s 20°24'S Libra -10.8 32'40"9
Venus 15h17m00s 14°29'S Libra -4.6 31"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2024

The sky on 28 June 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:08
Twilight ends
21:52
Twilight begins
03:56


Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:52 14:03 21:14
Venus 06:11 13:23 20:35
Moon 00:26 06:34 12:52
Mars 02:26 09:11 15:56
Jupiter 03:43 10:46 17:49
Saturn 00:01 05:47 11:33
All times shown in PDT.

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

23 Dec 1986  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
15 Jan 1987  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
02 Apr 1988  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
02 Apr 1988  –  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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