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 3°57' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 7° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.2, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair 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.

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 14h39m30s 10°20'S Libra -8.2 29'55"8
Venus 14h39m30s 14°18'S Libra -3.9 10"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Nov 2017

The sky on 17 November 2017
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
16:32
Twilight ends
18:08
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Crescent

0%

29 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:37 13:03 17:30
Venus 05:36 10:47 15:58
Moon 05:39 11:05 16:25
Mars 03:22 09:06 14:51
Jupiter 05:13 10:29 15:45
Saturn 09:08 13:47 18:26
All times shown in EST.

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

02 Aug 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
06 Jun 2018  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
17 Aug 2018  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
13 Dec 2018  –  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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