The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 23' 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 Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:23 (EDT), 15° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 47 minutes after the Sun at 21:51.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h00m30s 0°10'N Virgo -10.5 30'13"3
Venus 12h00m30s 0°12'S Virgo -4.2 19"5

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 18 Sep 2024

The sky on 18 September 2024
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
18:56
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:00

15-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:40 12:10 18:39
Venus 08:59 14:30 20:01
Moon 18:53 00:51 07:04
Mars 00:02 07:35 15:08
Jupiter 22:51 06:19 13:47
Saturn 18:35 00:10 05:45
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.

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23 Dec 1978  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
18 Jan 1979  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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