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 44' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:13 (EST), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 30 minutes after the Sun at 20:26.

The Moon will be at mag -8.8, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 01h11m50s 6°00'N Pisces -8.8 33'10"7
Venus 01h11m50s 6°45'N Pisces -3.9 10"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Mar 2034

The sky on 21 March 2034
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
18:56
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
05:09


Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:00 11:21 16:43
Venus 07:30 13:58 20:26
Moon 07:32 13:59 20:36
Mars 08:34 15:45 22:56
Jupiter 06:32 12:20 18:09
Saturn 12:13 19:46 03:19
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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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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