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 4°20' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:30 (EST) – 3 hours and 8 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 31° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:21.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Venus at mag -4.1, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h58m10s 11°59'N Leo -10.4 32'42"3
Venus 10h58m10s 7°38'N Leo -4.1 14"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Oct 2020

The sky on 13 October 2020
Sunrise
07:38
Sunset
18:54
Twilight ends
20:24
Twilight begins
06:08


Waning Crescent

7%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:33 14:32 19:30
Venus 04:28 10:58 17:27
Moon 03:33 10:37 17:30
Mars 19:03 01:24 07:45
Jupiter 14:39 19:20 00:02
Saturn 15:02 19:48 00:35
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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06 Dec 2021  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
16 Feb 2022  –  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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