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 5°15' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h16m40s 8°30'S Virgo -9.6 31'09"4
Venus 14h16m40s 13°46'S Virgo -3.9 11"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Virgo 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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