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 39.7 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 25 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:53 (EST) – 3 hours and 39 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 37° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:16.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 10h04m10s 8°57'N Leo -10.5 29'35"8
Venus 10h04m50s 9°35'N Leo -4.5 29"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2024

The sky on 24 November 2024
Sunrise
07:25
Sunset
17:09
Twilight ends
18:44
Twilight begins
05:49


Waning Crescent

34%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:09 13:40 18:11
Venus 10:49 15:21 19:52
Moon 01:04 07:35 13:56
Mars 21:28 04:47 12:07
Jupiter 18:00 01:23 08:47
Saturn 13:39 19:12 00:45
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

06 Jun 2015  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
22 Oct 2015  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
26 Oct 2015  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
12 Jan 2017  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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