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 2°15' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 3 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 become visible at around 16:30 (EST), 20° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 6 minutes after the Sun at 19:17.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h58m00s 25°23'S Sagittarius -10.5 31'04"8
Venus 19h58m00s 23°08'S Sagittarius -4.2 17"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Dec 2024

The sky on 4 December 2024
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
16:11
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:14


Waxing Crescent

17%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:10 11:48 16:26
Venus 10:13 14:44 19:16
Moon 10:22 14:38 19:00
Mars 19:57 03:25 10:52
Jupiter 16:17 23:47 07:17
Saturn 12:15 17:46 23:17
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.

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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