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 5°34' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:42 (EDT) – 1 hour and 55 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:18.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4 in the constellation Auriga, and Venus at mag -3.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

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 06h19m50s 28°24'N Auriga -9.4 30'33"3
Venus 06h19m50s 22°49'N Gemini -3.9 11"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jul 2024

The sky on 16 July 2024
Sunrise
05:31
Sunset
20:23
Twilight ends
22:23
Twilight begins
03:30


Waxing Gibbous

82%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:47 14:44 21:40
Venus 06:28 13:46 21:04
Moon 16:14 20:56 01:32
Mars 01:40 08:52 16:04
Jupiter 02:28 09:52 17:15
Saturn 22:55 04:36 10:17
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

25 Mar 2006  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 May 2007  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
09 Jun 2007  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
24 Oct 2007  –  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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