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 3°49' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 26 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:57 (EDT) – 2 hours and 34 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:11.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Venus at mag -4.5, 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 04h47m30s 21°33'N Taurus -10.2 29'39"1
Venus 04h47m30s 17°44'N Taurus -4.5 35"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Apr 2024

The sky on 19 April 2024
Sunrise
06:04
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:18
Twilight begins
04:24

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

88%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 12:02 18:29
Venus 05:44 12:06 18:29
Moon 15:33 22:15 04:46
Mars 04:43 10:29 16:16
Jupiter 07:09 14:15 21:21
Saturn 04:31 10:08 15:45
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

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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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