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 a mere 32.2 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:24 (PDT), 30° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 55 minutes after the Sun at 23:01.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 09h00m20s 19°27'N Cancer -10.5 31'02"8
Venus 08h59m30s 18°57'N Cancer -4.4 26"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2025

The sky on 4 July 2025
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waxing Gibbous

70%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:49 14:43 21:37
Venus 03:00 09:53 16:45
Moon 14:59 20:17 01:28
Mars 10:18 16:45 23:12
Jupiter 05:12 12:23 19:33
Saturn 00:11 06:10 12:08
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

09 Jun 2007  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
25 Oct 2007  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
28 Oct 2007  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
14 Jan 2009  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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