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 4'37" to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

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

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.8, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 15h14m50s 18°07'S Libra -8.8 33'17"9
Venus 15h14m50s 18°02'S Libra -3.9 10"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
16:28
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:10


Waning Crescent

45%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:40 13:06 17:32
Venus 10:13 14:39 19:06
Moon 22:16 05:32 12:36
Mars 20:52 04:15 11:38
Jupiter 17:26 00:53 08:20
Saturn 13:09 18:41 00:13
All times shown in EST.

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

11 Jan 2003  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
29 Mar 2004  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
28 Mar 2004  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Jun 2004  –  Transit of Venus

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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