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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:21 (EDT) – 3 hours and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 37° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:00.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 11h27m00s 1°40'S Leo -10.7 31'35"2
Venus 11h36m10s 3°04'N Leo -4.4 24"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:27


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:42 11:35 18:28
Venus 08:11 14:13 20:14
Moon 04:22 11:47 18:59
Mars 00:13 07:49 15:26
Jupiter 23:40 07:11 14:42
Saturn 19:37 01:13 06:49
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

02 Nov 1991  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
19 Jan 1993  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Feb 1993  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
10 Jun 1993  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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