Close approach of Venus and M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

Objects: M44 Venus

Venus and M44 will make a close approach, passing within 1°08' of each other.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 16° above the horizon at dawn.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and M44 around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 08h39m10s 18°32'N Cancer -4.0 12"2
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Aug 2025

The sky on 31 August 2025
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
21:04
Twilight begins
04:37


Waxing Gibbous

63%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 12:07 19:02
Venus 03:37 10:49 18:01
Moon 14:48 19:08 23:25
Mars 09:26 15:09 20:51
Jupiter 02:01 09:28 16:56
Saturn 20:22 02:17 08:11
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.

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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