The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 7°50' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will become visible at around 20:08 (PDT), 29° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 55 minutes after the Sun at 22:46.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1 in the constellation Orion, and Venus at mag -4.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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:

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 May 2024

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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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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