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 4°20' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 2 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 7° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -9.1, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h19m10s 17°44'S Scorpius -9.1 29'35"9
Venus 16h19m10s 22°05'S Scorpius -3.9 11"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Nov 2024

The sky on 17 November 2024
Sunrise
06:35
Sunset
16:19
Twilight ends
17:57
Twilight begins
04:57


Waning Gibbous

90%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:40 13:01 17:22
Venus 10:04 14:24 18:45
Moon 16:41 00:42 08:51
Mars 20:55 04:22 11:48
Jupiter 17:36 01:07 08:38
Saturn 13:22 18:52 00:22
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.

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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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