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 2 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -7.9, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h45m40s 19°33'S Sagittarius -7.9 30'12"1
Venus 18h45m40s 23°59'S Sagittarius -3.9 10"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius 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.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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