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 6°23' to the south 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 17:24 (EDT), 36° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 56 minutes after the Sun at 21:01.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in the constellation Aquarius, and Venus at mag -4.5 in the neighbouring constellation of Pisces.

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:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h41m10s 7°18'S Aquarius -10.5 29'44"3
Venus 23h41m10s 0°55'S Pisces -4.5 27"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Sep 2024

The sky on 29 September 2024
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
18:37
Twilight ends
20:09
Twilight begins
05:13

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:40 12:40 18:40
Venus 09:25 14:37 19:49
Moon 03:31 10:38 17:33
Mars 23:46 07:18 14:49
Jupiter 22:10 05:38 13:06
Saturn 17:46 23:20 04:54
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.

Related news

17 Jan 2001  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
06 Feb 2001  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
07 Jun 2001  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
04 Aug 2001  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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