Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 5°59' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will become visible at around 17:50 (EDT), 38° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 54 minutes after the Sun at 21:27.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

At around the same time, the trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 01h44m50s 5°54'N Pisces -10.6 30'51"4
Venus 01h37m20s 11°37'N Pisces -4.3 19"7
Neptune 01h24m30s 7°07'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

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

The sky on 1 Jul 2024

The sky on 1 July 2024
Sunrise
05:08
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:38
Twilight begins
02:55


Waning Crescent

16%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:34 14:05 21:37
Venus 05:43 13:19 20:55
Moon 01:26 08:46 16:21
Mars 01:56 08:59 16:02
Jupiter 03:04 10:29 17:54
Saturn 23:47 05:27 11:08
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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