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 a mere 28.3 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:56 (EDT), 35° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 30 minutes after the Sun at 21:09.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Venus will be at mag -4.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 00h53m30s 10°30'N Pisces -10.2 29'32"0
Venus 00h52m50s 10°56'N Pisces -4.6 39"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Sep 2024

The sky on 27 September 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
18:40
Twilight ends
20:13
Twilight begins
05:11


Waning Crescent

21%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 12:35 18:40
Venus 09:21 14:36 19:51
Moon 01:20 09:08 16:44
Mars 23:49 07:21 14:53
Jupiter 22:18 05:46 13:14
Saturn 17:54 23:28 05:02
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

08 Feb 1993  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
10 Jun 1993  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
04 Aug 1993  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
09 Jun 1994  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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