Close approach of Venus and M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

Objects: M44 Venus

Venus and M44 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 45.2 arcminutes of each other.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 21:31 (EST), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 58 minutes after the Sun at 23:26.

Venus will be at mag -4.4; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and M44 around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 08h41m20s 20°22'N Cancer -4.4 27"3
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Jun 2031

The sky on 14 June 2031
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:06
Twilight begins
04:44


Waning Crescent

22%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:49 13:55 21:02
Venus 09:44 16:37 23:30
Moon 02:41 09:14 15:53
Mars 16:30 21:59 03:28
Jupiter 20:24 01:30 06:36
Saturn 05:49 12:44 19:39
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.

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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