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 17' 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 South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 20:13 (PDT), 30° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 58 minutes after the Sun at 22:54.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Venus at mag -4.1, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h16m10s 21°45'N Cancer -10.3 29'34"3
Venus 08h16m10s 22°03'N Cancer -4.1 17"4

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

The sky on 16 Jul 2026

The sky on 16 July 2026
Sunrise
05:49
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:44
Twilight begins
04:08


Waxing Crescent

7%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 12:29 19:20
Venus 09:21 15:51 22:20
Moon 08:28 15:16 21:53
Mars 02:50 09:57 17:04
Jupiter 06:36 13:35 20:35
Saturn 23:59 06:11 12:22
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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01 Dec 2138  –  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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