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 3°49' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:36 (EDT) – 2 hours and 1 minute before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5 in the constellation Orion, and Venus at mag -3.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

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 06h09m40s 18°56'N Orion -9.5 31'43"6
Venus 06h09m40s 22°46'N Gemini -3.9 11"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:25
Twilight ends
21:02
Twilight begins
04:39


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:35
Venus 08:20 14:21 20:23
Moon 04:34 11:56 19:05
Mars 00:26 07:58 15:30
Jupiter 23:52 07:19 14:47
Saturn 19:45 01:22 06:58
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

27 Mar 1998  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 May 1999  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Jun 1999  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
25 Oct 1999  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning 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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