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 9°00' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Leo.

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 09h36m50s 18°55'N Leo -8.9 30'23"4
Venus 09h36m50s 9°55'N Leo -4.3 50"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2024

The sky on 2 July 2024
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:14


Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:52 14:17 21:43
Venus 05:57 13:29 21:00
Moon 02:09 09:49 17:42
Mars 02:06 09:07 16:08
Jupiter 03:13 10:34 17:56
Saturn 23:50 05:32 11:13
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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17 Oct 2039  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
19 Oct 2039  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
05 Jan 2041  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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