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 and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 1°56' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:20 (PDT) – 2 hours and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:56.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.2; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 07h04m00s 19°40'N Gemini -10.2 31'55"1
Venus 07h05m40s 21°34'N Gemini -4.0 13"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2025

The sky on 30 June 2025
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:56

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

36%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 14:43 21:42
Venus 03:01 09:51 16:40
Moon 11:11 17:34 23:48
Mars 10:22 16:52 23:22
Jupiter 05:24 12:34 19:45
Saturn 00:26 06:25 12:24
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

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24 Aug 1994  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
21 Dec 1994  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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