The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 5°38' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.
From Cambridge , the trio will become visible at around 20:46 (EDT), 24° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 44 minutes after the Sun at 23:08.
The Moon will be at mag -10.5; Venus will be at mag -4.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.0. The trio will lie in the constellation Cancer.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.
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 | 08h59m00s | 12°57'N | Cancer | -10.5 | 30'01"8 |
| Venus | 09h04m10s | 18°27'N | Cancer | -4.4 | 27"8 |
| Jupiter | 09h12m30s | 17°04'N | Cancer | -2.0 | 34"5 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.
The sky on 24 Apr 2024
| The sky on 24 April 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
97% 16 days old |
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
| 06 Jun 2015 | – Venus at greatest elongation east |
| 22 Oct 2015 | – Venus at highest altitude in morning sky |
| 26 Oct 2015 | – Venus at greatest elongation west |
| 12 Jan 2017 | – 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.