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 3°03' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 2 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 2° below the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 14h06m20s 17°48'S Virgo -8.6 30'22"4
Venus 14h06m20s 20°51'S Virgo -4.3 56"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Oct 2026

The sky on 11 October 2026
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
18:18
Twilight ends
19:50
Twilight begins
05:25


Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:14 14:10 19:05
Venus 08:53 13:38 18:24
Moon 08:07 13:19 18:21
Mars 00:57 08:13 15:28
Jupiter 02:09 09:07 16:04
Saturn 18:07 00:16 06:24
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

14 Aug 2026  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
11 Dec 2026  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
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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