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 6°35' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 20:01 (EDT), 13° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 35 minutes after the Sun at 21:19.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.1, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair 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.

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 13h59m10s 6°43'S Virgo -10.5 32'53"6
Venus 13h59m10s 13°19'S Virgo -4.1 16"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° 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
06:29
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
04:46


Waxing Crescent

28%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:41 11:56 18:11
Venus 04:45 10:51 16:58
Moon 09:25 17:27 01:25
Mars 12:07 19:25 02:42
Jupiter 08:47 16:13 23:39
Saturn 04:53 10:47 16:40
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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