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 3°23' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:43 (EDT), 8° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 16 minutes after the Sun at 21:39.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h02m20s 27°43'N Gemini -8.5 31'56"9
Venus 06h02m20s 24°19'N Gemini -3.9 10"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Oct 2024

The sky on 9 October 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
18:20
Twilight ends
19:52
Twilight begins
05:24


Waxing Crescent

47%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:30 13:03 18:36
Venus 09:50 14:46 19:41
Moon 13:49 18:05 22:21
Mars 23:31 07:01 14:31
Jupiter 21:32 05:00 12:28
Saturn 17:05 22:38 04:11
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

07 Sep 1988  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
08 Nov 1989  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
16 Dec 1989  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
25 Feb 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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