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 21' 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 South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:42 (PDT) – 3 hours and 16 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:41.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Orion.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 05h54m50s 20°33'N Orion -10.6 32'55"0
Venus 05h54m50s 20°55'N Orion -4.2 18"7

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

The sky on 23 Aug 2026

The sky on 23 August 2026
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
20:58
Twilight begins
04:47


Waxing Gibbous

84%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 12:40 19:23
Venus 09:58 15:37 21:17
Moon 17:05 21:51 02:39
Mars 02:06 09:18 16:30
Jupiter 04:47 11:40 18:33
Saturn 21:28 03:39 09:50
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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28 Sep 2125  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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