Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 1°34' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:00 (EDT) – 2 hours and 18 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:58.

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 29 Sep 2024

The sky on 29 September 2024
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
18:37
Twilight ends
20:09
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:40 12:40 18:40
Venus 09:25 14:37 19:49
Moon 03:31 10:38 17:33
Mars 23:46 07:18 14:49
Jupiter 22:10 05:38 13:06
Saturn 17:46 23:20 04:54
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

07 Jun 2001  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
04 Aug 2001  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
08 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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