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 53' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 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 become visible at around 20:05 (EST), 29° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 0 minutes after the Sun at 22:48.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h34m20s 16°44'N Aries -10.1 30'22"7
Venus 02h34m20s 15°51'N Aries -4.0 13"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Mar 2031

The sky on 26 March 2031
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
19:48
Twilight ends
21:20
Twilight begins
05:52


Waxing Crescent

13%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:42 14:22 21:01
Venus 08:53 15:52 22:51
Moon 09:11 16:23 23:40
Mars 23:28 04:34 09:40
Jupiter 02:27 07:08 11:48
Saturn 10:13 17:24 00:36
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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02 Jun 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
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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