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 24.9 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 19:24 (PST), 16° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 43 minutes after the Sun at 20:51.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Venus will be at mag -4.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 13h39m00s 11°23'S Virgo -10.4 31'21"8
Venus 13h39m20s 10°59'S Virgo -4.1 15"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Dec 2025

The sky on 10 December 2025
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
16:42
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:15


Waning Gibbous

54%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 10:19 15:32
Venus 06:16 11:16 16:16
Moon 22:09 04:53 11:28
Mars 07:23 12:16 17:09
Jupiter 19:10 02:15 09:20
Saturn 12:25 18:17 00:08
All times shown in PST.

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

31 Aug 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
31 Oct 2013  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
05 Dec 2013  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
21 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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