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 4°26' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:51 (EDT) – 1 hour and 4 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:37.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h25m00s 5°24'N Pisces -9.6 30'14"8
Venus 00h25m00s 0°57'N Pisces -3.9 12"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Oct 2024

The sky on 3 October 2024
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
18:30
Twilight ends
20:02
Twilight begins
05:17


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 12:49 18:38
Venus 09:35 14:40 19:46
Moon 07:34 13:15 18:47
Mars 23:40 07:11 14:42
Jupiter 21:55 05:23 12:51
Saturn 17:30 23:03 04:37
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

13 Jan 1995  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
31 Mar 1996  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
31 Mar 1996  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
20 Aug 1996  –  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.

Share