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 5°42' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:32 (EST) – 2 hours and 39 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:51.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1 in the constellation Scorpius, and Venus at mag -4.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Ophiuchus.

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 16h42m10s 26°14'S Scorpius -10.1 31'39"2
Venus 16h42m10s 20°32'S Ophiuchus -4.0 13"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jan 2024

The sky on 8 January 2024
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:08
Twilight begins
05:30


Waning Crescent

6%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:29 10:10 14:51
Venus 04:31 09:15 13:59
Moon 04:37 09:00 13:17
Mars 06:17 10:45 15:13
Jupiter 11:57 18:46 01:35
Saturn 09:37 14:57 20:17
All times shown in EST.

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.

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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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