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 2°16' 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 Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 18:31 (EST), 9° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 17 minutes after the Sun at 19:31.

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

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 14h59m40s 15°24'S Libra -9.9 30'22"2
Venus 14h59m40s 17°41'S Libra -4.0 12"7

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

The sky on 7 Oct 2032

The sky on 7 October 2032
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
18:14
Twilight ends
19:47
Twilight begins
05:11


Waxing Crescent

10%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:39 13:46 18:54
Venus 09:41 14:37 19:32
Moon 09:48 14:53 19:55
Mars 04:17 10:45 17:14
Jupiter 14:36 19:13 23:49
Saturn 22:35 06:06 13:37
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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31 Jan 2033  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
29 May 2033  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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