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 6°29' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 25 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 02:59 (EST) – 3 hours and 49 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 37° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:31.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.5, 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 10h09m00s 16°04'N Leo -10.6 29'27"6
Venus 10h09m00s 9°35'N Leo -4.5 28"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Oct 2023

The sky on 10 October 2023
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
18:11
Twilight ends
19:44
Twilight begins
05:15


Waning Crescent

13%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:11 12:06 18:01
Venus 03:00 09:38 16:17
Moon 02:33 09:45 16:44
Mars 07:51 13:15 18:38
Jupiter 19:17 02:14 09:12
Saturn 16:25 21:40 02:55
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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