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 7°51' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 20:40 (EST), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 12 minutes after the Sun at 21:33.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 09h57m00s 17°15'N Leo -9.5 29'23"7
Venus 09h57m00s 9°23'N Leo -4.4 45"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Jul 2023

The sky on 20 July 2023
Sunrise
05:34
Sunset
20:21
Twilight ends
22:19
Twilight begins
03:35


Waxing Crescent

8%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 14:19 21:24
Venus 08:20 14:57 21:33
Moon 08:08 15:16 22:13
Mars 08:52 15:32 22:11
Jupiter 00:46 07:40 14:35
Saturn 22:11 03:35 08:59
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.

Share