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 1°50' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:29 (EST), 40° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:13.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair 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.

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 03h16m00s 19°28'N Aries -10.5 29'26"5
Venus 03h16m00s 21°18'N Aries -4.4 23"3

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

The sky on 28 Nov 2024

The sky on 28 November 2024
Sunrise
06:53
Sunset
16:25
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:15


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:13 12:44 17:15
Venus 10:16 14:47 19:17
Moon 04:25 09:34 14:35
Mars 20:32 03:55 11:18
Jupiter 17:00 00:27 07:53
Saturn 12:46 18:18 23:50
All times shown in EST.

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

26 Mar 2012  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
27 Mar 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
05 Jun 2012  –  Transit of Venus
15 Aug 2012  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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