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°01' 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 Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:42 (EST), 19° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 6 minutes after the Sun at 22:28.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.1, 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 10h41m40s 7°20'N Leo -10.6 31'54"9
Venus 10h41m40s 9°21'N Leo -4.1 18"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2026

The sky on 17 July 2026
Sunrise
05:32
Sunset
20:22
Twilight ends
22:23
Twilight begins
03:31


Waxing Crescent

18%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:17 12:24 19:31
Venus 09:15 15:52 22:28
Moon 09:22 15:59 22:23
Mars 02:30 09:57 17:24
Jupiter 06:17 13:34 20:51
Saturn 23:53 06:08 12:23
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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05 Jun 2026  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
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11 Dec 2026  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
03 Jan 2027  –  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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