Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 39.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will become visible at around 17:05 (PST), 20° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 31 minutes after the Sun at 19:20.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 18h08m00s 26°27'S Sagittarius -10.5 32'08"1
Venus 18h07m40s 25°48'S Sagittarius -4.1 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:02


Waning Crescent

44%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:17 13:06 17:54
Venus 09:50 14:39 19:28
Moon 22:39 05:37 12:27
Mars 21:10 04:14 11:18
Jupiter 17:46 00:53 08:00
Saturn 13:02 18:40 00:19
All times shown in PST.

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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