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 5°10' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:25 (EST) – 1 hour and 34 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:41.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3 in the constellation Aquarius, and Venus at mag -4.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Pisces.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 23h48m20s 3°34'S Aquarius -10.3 32'06"7
Venus 23h48m20s 1°36'N Pisces -4.5 42"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2017

The sky on 23 April 2017
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:24
Twilight begins
04:17


Waning Crescent

7%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:43 12:27 19:10
Venus 04:25 10:33 16:42
Moon 04:37 10:25 16:22
Mars 07:19 14:41 22:03
Jupiter 17:59 23:45 05:31
Saturn 23:54 04:35 09:15
All times shown in EDT.

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.

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02 Aug 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
06 Jun 2018  –  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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