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 6°51' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:43 (EDT), 18° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 5 minutes after the Sun at 22:27.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in the constellation Sextans, and Venus at mag -4.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Leo.

The pair 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.

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 10h15m50s 5°25'N Sextans -10.5 31'30"7
Venus 10h15m50s 12°17'N Leo -4.1 16"2

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

The sky on 4 Oct 2024

The sky on 4 October 2024
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
18:19
Twilight ends
19:53
Twilight begins
05:08


Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 12:43 18:29
Venus 09:32 14:33 19:34
Moon 08:29 13:47 18:57
Mars 23:26 07:01 14:36
Jupiter 21:39 05:11 12:43
Saturn 17:18 22:50 04:23
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

09 Jun 1994  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
24 Aug 1994  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
19 Dec 1994  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
13 Jan 1995  –  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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