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 1°28' 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 however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h13m40s 4°32'N Pisces -9.5 32'25"9
Venus 01h13m40s 6°00'N Pisces -3.9 11"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 5 May 2035

The sky on 5 May 2035
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
19:52
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
03:55


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:34 14:08 21:41
Venus 04:48 11:12 17:35
Moon 04:41 10:55 17:19
Mars 02:12 07:08 12:05
Jupiter 05:14 11:56 18:37
Saturn 10:42 18:03 01:25
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.

Related news

01 Jan 2035  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
19 Mar 2036  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
22 Mar 2036  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
08 Aug 2036  –  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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