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 5°31' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:00 (PDT) – 3 hours and 29 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 38° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:14.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Venus will be at mag -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h12m50s 23°42'N Cancer -10.4 29'42"8
Venus 08h06m00s 18°25'N Cancer -4.2 20"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Leo 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.

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04 Sep 1988  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
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13 Dec 1989  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
01 Mar 1990  –  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.

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