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 41' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 1° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair 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.

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 00h04m30s 0°26'S Pisces -8.5 33'15"9
Venus 00h04m30s 1°08'S Pisces -3.9 10"2

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

The sky on 6 Apr 2016

The sky on 6 April 2016
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
19:16
Twilight ends
20:55
Twilight begins
04:37


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:45 13:36 20:28
Venus 05:49 11:48 17:48
Moon 05:57 12:05 18:22
Mars 23:27 04:09 08:51
Jupiter 16:16 22:46 05:17
Saturn 00:02 04:44 09:26
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

26 Oct 2015  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
12 Jan 2017  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
03 Feb 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
03 Jun 2017  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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