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 3°34' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:39 (EST) – 3 hours and 40 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° 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 -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h29m30s 14°10'N Cancer -10.5 30'47"7
Venus 08h33m50s 17°36'N Cancer -4.2 18"0

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

The sky on 28 Nov 2024

The sky on 28 November 2024
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:13
Twilight ends
17:53
Twilight begins
05:08

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 12:35 17:02
Venus 10:12 14:38 19:04
Moon 04:19 09:25 14:23
Mars 20:20 03:46 11:13
Jupiter 16:47 00:18 07:49
Saturn 12:38 18:09 23:40
All times shown in EST.

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

03 Sep 2012  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
31 Oct 2013  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
08 Dec 2013  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
18 Feb 2014  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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