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°42' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:47 (EDT) – 2 hours and 49 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 25° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:16.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Venus at mag -4.0, 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 05h20m20s 18°31'N Taurus -10.3 31'23"5
Venus 05h20m20s 21°14'N Taurus -4.0 14"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Jul 2033

The sky on 22 July 2033
Sunrise
05:36
Sunset
20:18
Twilight ends
22:16
Twilight begins
03:38


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:16 11:34 18:52
Venus 02:46 10:08 17:31
Moon 02:18 09:40 17:04
Mars 18:38 22:48 02:58
Jupiter 21:57 03:23 08:49
Saturn 04:18 11:46 19:13
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.

Related news

29 May 2033  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
31 Jul 2033  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
04 Jun 2034  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
12 Aug 2034  –  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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