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°12' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 28 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 dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 03h44m00s 23°56'N Taurus -8.5 33'17"7
Venus 03h44m00s 18°43'N Taurus -3.9 10"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2024

The sky on 25 July 2024
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
03:26


Waning Gibbous

68%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 14:32 21:13
Venus 06:38 13:47 20:56
Moon 22:20 04:15 10:24
Mars 01:12 08:33 15:55
Jupiter 01:47 09:15 16:44
Saturn 22:12 03:51 09:30
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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20 Mar 2044  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
06 Aug 2044  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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