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 South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:00 (PDT), 20° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 59 minutes after the Sun at 21:43.

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 26 Oct 2025

The sky on 26 October 2025
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
18:04
Twilight ends
19:28
Twilight begins
05:39


Waxing Crescent

24%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:05 14:05 19:04
Venus 05:40 11:30 17:20
Moon 12:04 16:43 21:22
Mars 08:44 13:53 19:03
Jupiter 23:12 06:16 13:20
Saturn 16:25 22:17 04:08
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

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
10 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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