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 5°23' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 17:42 (EST), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 32 minutes after the Sun at 19:57.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h19m10s 6°32'N Pisces -9.9 31'22"0
Venus 00h19m10s 1°09'N Pisces -4.0 12"0

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

The sky on 23 Feb 2031

The sky on 23 February 2031
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
17:25
Twilight ends
18:59
Twilight begins
04:53


Waxing Crescent

10%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:44 12:08 17:32
Venus 07:41 13:47 19:54
Moon 07:10 13:30 20:00
Mars 23:18 04:26 09:34
Jupiter 02:35 07:08 11:42
Saturn 10:15 17:31 00:46
All times shown in EST.

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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19 Oct 2031  –  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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