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 1°11' of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:38 (EDT), 10° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 24 minutes after the Sun at 19:45.

The Moon will be at mag -10.0; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

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

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 15h11m00s 17°22'S Libra -10.0 31'29"4
Venus 15h09m10s 18°28'S Libra -4.0 12"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Virgo 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

10%

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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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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