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

Close approach of the Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°23' of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Cambridge , the quartet will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:30 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 44° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:35.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.2; Venus will be at mag -4.0; Jupiter will be at mag -1.9; and Saturn will be at mag 0.8. The quartet will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be too widely separated to fit 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 quartet at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 12h29m20s 1°12'N Virgo -11.2 29'31"1
Venus 12h26m00s 1°02'S Virgo -4.0 13"7
Jupiter 12h25m20s 1°27'S Virgo -1.9 33"2
Saturn 12h23m30s 0°13'S Virgo 0.8 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The quartet will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:42
Twilight begins
04:55

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

86%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 13:49 20:39
Venus 06:00 11:45 17:29
Moon 21:41 02:49 07:48
Mars 05:22 10:44 16:05
Jupiter 08:10 15:13 22:17
Saturn 05:45 11:17 16:50
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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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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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