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°17' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:56 (EST) – 1 hour and 13 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:52.

The Moon will be at mag -9.8, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h49m10s 5°21'S Aquarius -9.8 30'15"6
Venus 22h49m10s 8°39'S Aquarius -4.0 12"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2027

The sky on 4 April 2027
Sunrise
07:09
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:32
Twilight begins
05:36


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:32 12:17 18:03
Venus 05:57 11:32 17:06
Moon 05:57 11:46 17:46
Mars 15:10 22:15 05:20
Jupiter 14:55 21:57 04:59
Saturn 07:28 13:46 20:04
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.

Related news

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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