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 6°33' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:11 (EST) – 2 hours and 50 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 20° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:43.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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

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 17h53m10s 27°34'S Sagittarius -10.5 29'26"2
Venus 17h53m10s 21°00'S Sagittarius -4.2 18"5

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

The sky on 2 Feb 2027

The sky on 2 February 2027
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
17:09
Twilight ends
18:44
Twilight begins
05:26


Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 13:16 18:41
Venus 04:11 08:56 13:41
Moon 04:43 08:57 13:11
Mars 18:53 01:43 08:33
Jupiter 17:49 00:46 07:43
Saturn 09:32 15:42 21:51
All times shown in EST.

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
24 Mar 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Aug 2028  –  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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