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 1°34' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:09 (PDT) – 2 hours and 30 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:21.

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

They 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.

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 02h41m20s 11°08'N Aries -10.6 31'07"9
Venus 02h39m00s 12°37'N Aries -4.2 21"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2025

The sky on 11 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:28
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Gibbous

76%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 12:44 19:04
Venus 04:13 10:59 17:45
Moon 20:51 03:48 10:55
Mars 09:12 14:51 20:30
Jupiter 01:45 08:52 15:58
Saturn 19:34 01:29 07:24
All times shown in PDT.

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

07 Jun 2001  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
28 Jul 2001  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
15 Jun 2002  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
21 Aug 2002  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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