Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 3°19' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:00 (EST), 12° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 34 minutes after the Sun at 21:16.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

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 12h39m10s 2°36'S Virgo -10.5 30'04"9
Venus 12h35m10s 5°47'S Virgo -4.4 25"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Aug 2034

The sky on 17 August 2034
Sunrise
05:50
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:28
Twilight begins
04:03


Waxing Crescent

18%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 13:37 20:18
Venus 09:51 15:33 21:16
Moon 09:27 15:30 21:25
Mars 05:52 12:49 19:47
Jupiter 21:35 03:51 10:08
Saturn 03:38 11:02 18:25
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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01 Jan 2035  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
19 Mar 2036  –  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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