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

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 19:12 (EDT), 20° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 16 minutes after the Sun at 21:13.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Venus will be at mag -4.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h18m20s 17°34'S Scorpius -10.7 32'11"7
Venus 16h11m20s 24°14'S Scorpius -4.3 21"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Jul 2024

The sky on 7 July 2024
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
20:31
Twilight ends
22:07
Twilight begins
04:52


Waxing Crescent

4%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:14 15:05 21:55
Venus 07:10 14:09 21:07
Moon 07:51 15:06 22:14
Mars 02:51 09:35 16:19
Jupiter 03:58 10:53 17:48
Saturn 23:57 05:46 11:34
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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