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

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:13 (EDT), 11° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 27 minutes after the Sun at 21:21.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h32m10s 1°01'S Leo -10.1 30'30"8
Venus 11h32m10s 4°06'N Leo -4.0 13"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 5 May 2024

The sky on 5 May 2024
Sunrise
05:31
Sunset
19:48
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
03:39


Waning Crescent

7%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:43 11:05 17:26
Venus 05:18 12:09 19:00
Moon 04:07 10:27 17:01
Mars 03:59 10:03 16:07
Jupiter 06:05 13:18 20:32
Saturn 03:24 09:02 14:40
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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