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 38' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:11 (PST) – 1 hour and 6 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:02.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.3, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 21h23m50s 16°40'S Capricornus -9.3 30'11"0
Venus 21h23m50s 16°01'S Capricornus -3.9 11"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:02

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

45%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:17 13:06 17:54
Venus 09:50 14:39 19:28
Moon 22:39 05:37 12:27
Mars 21:10 04:14 11:18
Jupiter 17:46 00:53 08:00
Saturn 13:02 18:40 00:19
All times shown in PST.

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

30 Oct 1999  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
16 Jan 2001  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
03 Feb 2001  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
07 Jun 2001  –  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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Los Angeles

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34.05°N
118.24°W
PST

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