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 2°55' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:46 (EST) – 1 hour and 25 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:56.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

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 22h43m10s 6°07'S Aquarius -9.9 30'13"1
Venus 22h48m30s 8°42'S Aquarius -4.0 12"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Apr 2027

The sky on 3 April 2027
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:07
Twilight begins
05:49


Waning Crescent

5%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:21 12:10 17:59
Venus 05:44 11:26 17:07
Moon 05:17 10:59 16:46
Mars 15:28 22:13 04:59
Jupiter 15:12 21:56 04:39
Saturn 07:31 13:44 19:57
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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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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