Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 6°15' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:49 (EST), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 36 minutes after the Sun at 23:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus 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
The Moon 09h03m10s 11°31'N Cancer -10.4 29'33"1
Venus 09h11m00s 17°30'N Cancer -4.4 31"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jun 2031

The sky on 23 June 2031
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:09


Waxing Crescent

16%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:29 14:05 21:41
Venus 08:48 15:56 23:03
Moon 08:52 15:46 22:31
Mars 15:41 20:52 02:04
Jupiter 19:39 00:16 04:53
Saturn 04:18 11:40 19:02
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.

Related news

02 Jun 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
19 Oct 2031  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
21 Oct 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
07 Jan 2033  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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