Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 5°34' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:22 (EDT), 32° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 33 minutes after the Sun at 23:36.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; and Venus will be at mag -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 06h48m20s 20°04'N Gemini -10.6 32'42"0
Venus 06h48m30s 25°38'N Gemini -4.2 18"5

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

The sky on 29 Jun 2024

The sky on 29 June 2024
Sunrise
05:07
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:53


Waning Crescent

36%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 13:58 21:33
Venus 05:39 13:16 20:53
Moon 00:37 07:07 13:50
Mars 02:00 09:01 16:03
Jupiter 03:10 10:35 18:00
Saturn 23:54 05:35 11:16
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

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
30 Oct 1999  –  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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