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 1°35' of each other. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:58 (EST) – 2 hours and 9 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:47.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

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 15h27m00s 18°57'S Libra -9.6 33'16"0
Venus 15h28m00s 17°23'S Libra -4.0 11"3

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

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08 Dec 2013  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
18 Feb 2014  –  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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