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 1°21' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:07 (EDT) – 1 hour and 49 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:38.

The Moon will be at mag -9.8, and Venus at mag -4.0, 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 18h46m50s 20°56'S Sagittarius -9.8 29'32"0
Venus 18h46m50s 22°17'S Sagittarius -4.0 12"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Sep 2024

The sky on 28 September 2024
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
18:30
Twilight ends
20:04
Twilight begins
05:01


Waning Crescent

10%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 12:29 18:31
Venus 09:17 14:28 19:39
Moon 02:14 09:46 17:05
Mars 23:35 07:11 14:47
Jupiter 22:01 05:33 13:05
Saturn 17:43 23:15 04:48
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

30 Oct 1999  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
17 Jan 2001  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
06 Feb 2001  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
07 Jun 2001  –  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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