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 4°01' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 18:15 (PDT), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 7 minutes after the Sun at 19:07.

The Moon will be at mag -7.9, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Cetus.

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 00h34m30s 1°30'S Cetus -7.9 29'24"0
Venus 00h34m30s 2°31'N Cetus -3.9 10"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Aug 2025

The sky on 14 August 2025
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:38


Waning Gibbous

55%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:34
Venus 03:25 10:30 17:35
Moon 22:17 05:01 11:55
Mars 09:36 15:35 21:34
Jupiter 03:11 10:20 17:28
Saturn 21:28 03:26 09:23
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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