Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 3°31' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:49 (EST), 25° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 43 minutes after the Sun at 23:11.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. 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 to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus 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
The Moon 09h12m40s 21°18'N Cancer -10.4 29'28"6
Venus 09h08m10s 17°57'N Cancer -4.4 29"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Jun 2023

The sky on 21 June 2023
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:09


Waxing Crescent

17%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:35 12:04 19:33
Venus 08:51 16:00 23:10
Moon 08:12 15:51 23:20
Mars 09:15 16:18 23:22
Jupiter 02:27 09:16 16:05
Saturn 00:06 05:32 10:58
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

04 Jun 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
20 Oct 2023  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
23 Oct 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 Jan 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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