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 9°06' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:51 (PDT) – 3 hours and 18 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:52.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in the constellation Auriga, and Venus at mag -4.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Orion.

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 06h05m50s 28°25'N Auriga -10.5 30'14"3
Venus 06h05m50s 19°19'N Orion -4.4 27"8

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

The sky on 10 Oct 2024

The sky on 10 October 2024
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
18:24
Twilight ends
19:47
Twilight begins
05:28


Waxing Gibbous

58%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:28 13:05 18:42
Venus 09:37 14:47 19:56
Moon 14:19 19:09 00:02
Mars 23:49 06:58 14:08
Jupiter 21:47 04:55 12:03
Saturn 16:54 22:33 04:13
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

02 Apr 1988  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
22 Aug 1988  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
04 Sep 1988  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
08 Nov 1989  –  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.

Share