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°55' 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 South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:21 (PDT) – 2 hours and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 29° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:57.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h14m50s 23°22'N Gemini -10.2 32'49"0
Venus 07h14m50s 21°27'N Gemini -4.0 13"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Aug 2025

The sky on 12 August 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:14
Twilight begins
04:36


Waning Gibbous

77%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:59 11:48 18:38
Venus 03:22 10:28 17:34
Moon 21:19 03:24 09:38
Mars 09:38 15:38 21:38
Jupiter 03:17 10:26 17:35
Saturn 21:36 03:34 09:32
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

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
19 Dec 2002  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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