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 6°05' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 20:28 (EDT), 22° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 5 minutes after the Sun at 22:18.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.3, 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 12h15m50s 3°33'N Virgo -10.6 32'51"1
Venus 12h15m50s 2°32'S Virgo -4.3 21"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Sep 2024

The sky on 30 September 2024
Sunrise
07:17
Sunset
19:12
Twilight ends
20:32
Twilight begins
05:57


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:17 13:16 19:14
Venus 09:44 15:12 20:39
Moon 05:20 11:53 18:19
Mars 00:49 07:50 14:51
Jupiter 23:09 06:08 13:07
Saturn 18:06 23:49 05:32
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

22 Jun 2002  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
21 Aug 2002  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
22 Dec 2002  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
11 Jan 2003  –  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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