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 3°55' to the south 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 Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:54 (EST), 33° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 23:13.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Venus at mag -4.1, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h59m30s 21°03'N Taurus -10.3 29'40"8
Venus 04h59m30s 24°58'N Taurus -4.1 16"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Apr 2031

The sky on 25 April 2031
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
19:36
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:00


Waxing Crescent

15%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:59 11:08 17:18
Venus 07:46 15:31 23:15
Moon 08:21 15:53 23:24
Mars 20:26 01:29 06:32
Jupiter 23:51 04:24 08:57
Saturn 07:31 14:52 22:13
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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