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 2°01' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 16:55 (EDT), 8° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 16 minutes after the Sun at 17:51.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h49m50s 15°58'S Sagittarius -8.5 33'25"5
Venus 19h49m50s 17°59'S Sagittarius -4.3 1'00"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 6 May 2024

The sky on 6 May 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:45
Twilight begins
03:52


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 11:12 17:34
Venus 05:28 12:18 19:09
Moon 04:41 11:27 18:28
Mars 04:06 10:11 16:16
Jupiter 06:14 13:24 20:35
Saturn 03:28 09:07 14:46
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

08 Dec 2013  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
18 Feb 2014  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
23 Mar 2014  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
09 May 2015  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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