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 2°03' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dawn.

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 -8.4, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair 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 two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 04h31m10s 21°27'N Taurus -8.4 29'33"0
Venus 04h31m10s 19°23'N Taurus -4.2 53"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Taurus 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

87%

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.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

05 Jun 2012  –  Transit of Venus
15 Aug 2012  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
03 Sep 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
31 Oct 2013  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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