Venus and M44 will make a close approach, passing within 1°10' of each other.
From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 16° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:21 (EDT) – 2 hours and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:02.
Venus will be at mag -4.0; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.
A graph of the angular separation between Venus and M44 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 |
| Venus | 08h39m10s | 18°31'N | Cancer | -4.0 | 12"3 |
| M44 | 08h40m20s | 19°40'N | Cancer | 3.1 | 0"0 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
The sky on 1 Sep 2017
| The sky on 1 September 2017 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
82% 11 days old |
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.
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.