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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:23 (EST) – 1 hour and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:38.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h20m40s 27°15'S Sagittarius -9.9 32'36"7
Venus 19h20m40s 21°50'S Sagittarius -4.0 11"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Feb 2024

The sky on 7 February 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
17:15
Twilight ends
18:49
Twilight begins
05:22


Waning Crescent

4%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 11:08 15:54
Venus 05:22 10:04 14:45
Moon 05:39 09:53 14:10
Mars 05:53 10:34 15:15
Jupiter 10:15 17:05 23:55
Saturn 07:54 13:20 18:46
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.

Related news

23 Oct 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 Jan 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
02 Feb 2025  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
31 May 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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