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 7°01' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 21:22 (EDT), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 34 minutes after the Sun at 22:36.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h15m10s 10°38'N Cancer -9.6 29'45"4
Venus 09h15m10s 17°39'N Cancer -3.9 11"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 29° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 2 May 2024

The sky on 2 May 2024
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:12
Twilight begins
04:43


Waning Crescent

35%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:38 11:56 18:15
Venus 06:11 12:54 19:37
Moon 03:38 08:46 14:04
Mars 04:53 10:54 16:55
Jupiter 07:08 14:15 21:22
Saturn 04:21 10:00 15:40
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

03 Sep 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
31 Oct 2013  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
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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