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 1°09' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:54 (EST) – 3 hours and 26 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 32° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair 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.

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 16h00m50s 18°34'S Libra -10.6 30'41"6
Venus 16h00m50s 17°24'S Libra -4.3 21"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
17:26
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:32


Waning Crescent

46%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:41 13:39 18:38
Venus 10:14 15:13 20:12
Moon 23:13 06:06 12:52
Mars 21:53 04:48 11:44
Jupiter 18:29 01:27 08:25
Saturn 13:33 19:15 00:56
All times shown in EST.

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.

Related news

27 Dec 2050  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
14 Mar 2052  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
16 Mar 2052  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
04 Aug 2052  –  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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