Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 43.6 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:07 (EDT) – 2 hours and 19 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 21° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:08.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4; and Venus will be at mag -3.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus 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
The Moon 10h09m30s 13°07'N Leo -9.4 30'39"5
Venus 10h08m10s 12°28'N Leo -3.9 11"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Sep 2025

The sky on 19 September 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
18:46
Twilight ends
20:21
Twilight begins
04:50


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:53 12:57 19:01
Venus 04:08 10:58 17:47
Moon 03:56 11:03 17:57
Mars 09:08 14:32 19:55
Jupiter 00:49 08:18 15:48
Saturn 18:56 00:48 06:40
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.

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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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