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, Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°42' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:29 (EST) – 3 hours and 32 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:41.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5 in Virgo; Venus will be at mag -4.0 in Virgo; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5 in Libra.

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 trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 14h19m20s 15°38'S Virgo -10.5 32'54"4
Venus 14h17m50s 11°57'S Virgo -4.0 11"9
Saturn 14h23m10s 11°49'S Libra 0.5 15"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus 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

4%

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.

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08 Jul 2013  –  Saturn ends retrograde motion

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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