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 6°40' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:37 (EDT) – 2 hours and 2 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:22.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9 in the constellation Sextans, and Venus at mag -3.9 in the neighbouring constellation of 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 10h41m10s 2°54'N Sextans -8.9 29'50"5
Venus 10h41m10s 9°35'N Leo -3.9 11"0

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

The sky on 13 May 2024

The sky on 13 May 2024
Sunrise
05:34
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
21:56
Twilight begins
03:40


Waxing Crescent

34%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:41 11:11 17:40
Venus 05:23 12:25 19:26
Moon 10:10 18:01 01:41
Mars 03:50 10:03 16:15
Jupiter 05:51 13:03 20:16
Saturn 03:02 08:42 14:21
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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