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 28.8 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 3 days old.

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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Venus will be at mag -4.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 13h53m20s 16°36'S Virgo -10.3 30'28"7
Venus 13h52m30s 17°02'S Virgo -4.5 36"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Sep 2026

The sky on 14 September 2026
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:03
Twilight ends
20:37
Twilight begins
04:55


Waxing Crescent

15%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:46 13:41 19:36
Venus 10:10 15:10 20:11
Moon 10:25 15:26 20:20
Mars 01:24 08:52 16:20
Jupiter 03:30 10:33 17:37
Saturn 19:58 02:10 08:21
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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03 Jan 2027  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
21 Mar 2028  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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