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 4°44' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:54 (EDT), 19° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 9 minutes after the Sun at 21:46.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Venus at mag -3.9, 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 03h33m00s 14°54'N Taurus -9.5 33'15"3
Venus 03h33m00s 19°38'N Taurus -3.9 11"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Apr 2034

The sky on 20 April 2034
Sunrise
06:03
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:18
Twilight begins
04:22


Waxing Crescent

7%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:05 12:45 19:25
Venus 07:14 14:31 21:47
Moon 07:34 14:45 22:02
Mars 07:52 15:20 22:48
Jupiter 04:58 10:57 16:56
Saturn 10:33 18:01 01:30
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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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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