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°17' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:52 (EST) – 1 hour and 17 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:52.

The Moon will be at mag -8.4, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h18m50s 20°54'N Cancer -8.4 29'44"6
Venus 09h18m50s 16°37'N Cancer -3.9 10"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Aug 2022

The sky on 25 August 2022
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:17
Twilight begins
04:29


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:33 14:31 20:29
Venus 04:51 11:55 18:59
Moon 04:09 11:45 19:11
Mars 23:27 06:42 13:57
Jupiter 20:59 03:07 09:15
Saturn 19:07 00:13 05:19
All times shown in EDT.

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

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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