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°38' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:54 (EDT), 32° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 23 minutes after the Sun at 22:59.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Venus at mag -4.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h21m00s 16°35'N Taurus -10.4 33'03"8
Venus 04h21m00s 23°14'N Taurus -4.1 14"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Jun 2024

The sky on 29 June 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12


Waning Crescent

36%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 14:07 21:38
Venus 05:52 13:24 20:57
Moon 00:47 07:15 13:57
Mars 02:11 09:10 16:09
Jupiter 03:22 10:44 18:05
Saturn 00:02 05:44 11:25
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.

Share