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 4°16' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Los Angeles , the pair will become visible at around 18:03 (PST), 39° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 31 minutes after the Sun at 21:19.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h30m50s 15°03'N Pisces -10.6 29'58"0
Venus 01h30m50s 10°46'N Pisces -4.2 19"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Feb 2028

The sky on 29 February 2028
Sunrise
06:20
Sunset
17:48
Twilight ends
19:11
Twilight begins
04:56


Waxing Crescent

19%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 10:21 15:35
Venus 08:14 14:47 21:20
Moon 08:10 15:00 21:58
Mars 06:37 12:21 18:05
Jupiter 18:44 00:57 07:10
Saturn 08:27 14:49 21:12
All times shown in PST.

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
23 Mar 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
10 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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