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 53' to the south 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 Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:01 (EDT), 33° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 50 minutes after the Sun at 20:32.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.6, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair 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.

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 22h38m00s 9°21'S Aquarius -10.5 29'36"9
Venus 22h38m00s 8°28'S Aquarius -4.6 30"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2024

The sky on 4 July 2024
Sunrise
05:23
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:16


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 14:23 21:45
Venus 06:02 13:31 21:01
Moon 03:35 11:45 19:58
Mars 02:02 09:05 16:07
Jupiter 03:06 10:28 17:50
Saturn 23:43 05:24 11:05
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.

Related news

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23 Jan 2073  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
17 May 2073  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
27 Jul 2073  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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