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 2°41' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:59 (PDT), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 24 minutes after the Sun at 21:07.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h09m30s 5°00'N Pisces -10.5 30'26"5
Venus 01h04m30s 7°24'N Pisces -4.2 17"2

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

The sky on 23 Aug 2025

The sky on 23 August 2025
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
20:58
Twilight begins
04:47


Waxing Crescent

0%

30 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:44 18:35
Venus 03:39 10:40 17:41
Moon 06:42 13:21 19:50
Mars 09:27 15:20 21:13
Jupiter 02:44 09:52 17:00
Saturn 20:52 02:49 08:45
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

10 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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