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 5°18' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge 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 -9.9, and Venus at mag -4.6, 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 13h46m50s 12°11'S Virgo -9.9 29'24"6
Venus 13h46m50s 17°30'S Virgo -4.6 41"6

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 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
03:23


Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:34 21:19
Venus 06:33 13:45 20:57
Moon 21:30 02:34 07:48
Mars 01:15 08:35 15:56
Jupiter 01:53 09:21 16:50
Saturn 22:20 03:59 09:39
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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29 Dec 2042  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
17 Mar 2044  –  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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