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 2°36' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 19:05 (PDT), 16° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 52 minutes after the Sun at 20:42.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Venus at mag -4.2, 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 14h32m30s 14°23'S Libra -10.4 29'26"9
Venus 14h32m30s 17°00'S Libra -4.2 19"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2026

The sky on 23 April 2026
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
20:59
Twilight begins
04:39


Waxing Crescent

47%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:25 11:36 17:46
Venus 07:30 14:31 21:33
Moon 11:49 19:09 02:19
Mars 05:13 11:24 17:36
Jupiter 10:51 18:00 01:09
Saturn 05:11 11:17 17:23
All times shown in PDT.

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

18 Jul 2069  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
14 Oct 2069  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
05 Feb 2070  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
05 Mar 2070  –  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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