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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°50' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:03 (EDT), 12° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 53 minutes after the Sun at 19:38.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair 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.

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 17h11m10s 17°56'S Ophiuchus -10.1 29'31"1
Venus 17h11m10s 24°46'S Ophiuchus -4.0 14"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Nov 2016

The sky on 3 November 2016
Sunrise
07:25
Sunset
17:45
Twilight ends
19:19
Twilight begins
05:51

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

13%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 12:52 17:54
Venus 10:44 15:12 19:41
Moon 10:39 15:42 20:43
Mars 13:13 17:50 22:27
Jupiter 04:53 10:43 16:34
Saturn 10:08 14:52 19:36
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

26 Oct 2015  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
12 Jan 2017  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
03 Feb 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
03 Jun 2017  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme