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 6°27' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:02 (PDT) – 3 hours and 28 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 38° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:15.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Venus will be at mag -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They 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.

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 08h31m20s 24°11'N Cancer -10.4 29'50"1
Venus 08h24m30s 17°55'N Cancer -4.2 18"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Leo 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

01 Sep 2004  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
03 Nov 2005  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Dec 2005  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
24 Feb 2006  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning 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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