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 4°07' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:13 (EST) – 1 hour and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:28.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6 in Pisces; and Venus will be at mag -4.1 in Aquarius.

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 23h25m30s 0°18'S Pisces -10.6 32'05"7
Venus 23h31m00s 4°12'S Aquarius -4.1 17"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Crescent

38%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:33 12:55 17:17
Venus 10:09 14:32 18:54
Moon 23:09 06:06 12:50
Mars 20:36 04:03 11:30
Jupiter 17:09 00:40 08:11
Saturn 12:58 18:29 23:59
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.

Related news

23 Mar 2014  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
09 May 2015  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
06 Jun 2015  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
22 Oct 2015  –  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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