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 6°10' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:15 (EDT), 11° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 30 minutes after the Sun at 20:28.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; and Venus will be at mag -4.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 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 14h08m40s 7°35'S Virgo -10.6 32'49"5
Venus 14h00m00s 13°23'S Virgo -4.1 16"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 May 2025

The sky on 1 May 2025
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
03:47


Waxing Crescent

26%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:52 11:08 17:25
Venus 03:57 10:04 16:11
Moon 08:24 16:37 00:46
Mars 11:13 18:37 02:02
Jupiter 07:51 15:26 23:00
Saturn 04:06 09:59 15:52
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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