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 1°44' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.4, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair 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.

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 10h13m00s 14°21'N Leo -8.4 29'47"4
Venus 10h13m00s 12°37'N Leo -3.9 10"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Aug 2024

The sky on 5 August 2024
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:45


Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:35 14:02 20:29
Venus 07:06 13:57 20:48
Moon 06:38 13:50 20:49
Mars 00:53 08:21 15:49
Jupiter 01:11 08:40 16:10
Saturn 21:27 03:06 08:44
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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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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