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 a mere 33.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:52 (EDT) – 3 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 34° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:02.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They 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.

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 06h23m50s 20°29'N Gemini -10.5 30'02"5
Venus 06h23m40s 19°56'N Gemini -4.3 23"9

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

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
21:00
Twilight begins
05:27

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

85%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:29 14:14 20:59
Venus 06:24 12:10 17:56
Moon 22:00 03:15 08:23
Mars 05:43 11:09 16:35
Jupiter 08:42 15:39 22:36
Saturn 06:07 11:43 17:19
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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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