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 7°08' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:53 (EDT) – 1 hour and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:57.

The Moon will be at mag -9.4, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h05m40s 24°51'N Taurus -9.4 31'16"5
Venus 04h05m40s 17°42'N Taurus -4.4 48"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Jun 2028

The sky on 20 June 2028
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:08


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:18 11:27 18:35
Venus 03:53 11:01 18:09
Moon 03:03 10:51 18:47
Mars 03:58 11:23 18:49
Jupiter 11:54 18:16 00:38
Saturn 02:34 09:20 16:05
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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01 Sep 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Oct 2029  –  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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