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°49' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:21 (EDT), 39° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:09.

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; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 03h17m20s 19°31'N Aries -10.5 29'26"6
Venus 03h16m10s 21°19'N Aries -4.4 23"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Pisces 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

88%

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.

Related news

26 Mar 2012  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
27 Mar 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
05 Jun 2012  –  Transit of Venus
15 Aug 2012  –  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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Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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