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 2°53' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 21:22 (EDT), 23° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 35 minutes after the Sun at 23:37.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h52m20s 22°38'N Cancer -10.3 30'37"7
Venus 08h48m40s 19°52'N Cancer -4.0 15"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2024

The sky on 3 July 2024
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
21:04
Twilight ends
23:05
Twilight begins
04:03


Waning Crescent

2%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:39 14:59 22:20
Venus 06:42 14:09 21:35
Moon 03:32 11:27 19:30
Mars 02:45 09:45 16:44
Jupiter 03:52 11:10 18:29
Saturn 00:25 06:07 11:49
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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