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 47' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 18h26m30s 23°59'S Sagittarius -8.5 31'04"1
Venus 18h26m30s 23°11'S Sagittarius -3.9 10"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jan 2029

The sky on 13 January 2029
Sunrise
07:14
Sunset
16:46
Twilight ends
18:24
Twilight begins
05:36


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 12:23 17:21
Venus 06:12 10:48 15:23
Moon 06:31 11:05 15:43
Mars 22:54 04:54 10:55
Jupiter 00:25 05:57 11:30
Saturn 11:48 18:28 01:09
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

01 Sep 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Oct 2029  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
03 Dec 2029  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
14 Feb 2030  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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