Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 1°54' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:26 (EDT) – 3 hours and 7 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 27° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:14.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Venus will be at mag -4.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h04m30s 9°17'S Virgo -10.3 32'55"7
Venus 14h01m10s 11°00'S Virgo -4.7 43"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Sep 2024

The sky on 30 September 2024
Sunrise
07:25
Sunset
19:15
Twilight ends
20:45
Twilight begins
05:54


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:24 13:21 19:18
Venus 10:04 15:17 20:29
Moon 05:15 11:58 18:31
Mars 00:27 07:55 15:23
Jupiter 22:49 06:13 13:38
Saturn 18:20 23:55 05:29
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

21 Aug 2002  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
17 Dec 2002  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
11 Jan 2003  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
29 Mar 2004  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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