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 2°53' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 21:21 (EDT), 16° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 52 minutes after the Sun at 22:54.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.5, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h15m10s 6°52'N Leo -10.5 32'30"1
Venus 10h15m10s 9°45'N Leo -4.5 35"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:37
Twilight begins
05:21


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:34 12:23 19:11
Venus 08:59 15:00 21:02
Moon 05:18 12:36 19:43
Mars 01:09 08:37 16:05
Jupiter 00:35 07:58 15:22
Saturn 20:23 02:00 07:38
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

14 Jun 1991  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
27 Oct 1991  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
02 Nov 1991  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
19 Jan 1993  –  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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