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 12' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:38 (EST) – 1 hour and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:51.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 01h46m40s 8°40'N Pisces -10.1 30'14"2
Venus 01h46m40s 8°52'N Pisces -4.0 14"0

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

The sky on 26 May 2022

The sky on 26 May 2022
Sunrise
05:11
Sunset
20:09
Twilight ends
22:15
Twilight begins
03:06


Waning Crescent

7%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:03 12:11 19:20
Venus 03:37 10:12 16:47
Moon 03:28 09:49 16:22
Mars 02:35 08:34 14:33
Jupiter 02:36 08:39 14:42
Saturn 01:09 06:18 11:28
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.

Related news

20 Mar 2022  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
08 May 2023  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
04 Jun 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
20 Oct 2023  –  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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