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 2°15' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:32 (EDT) – 1 hour and 54 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:07.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Venus will be at mag -4.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h04m40s 2°52'N Pisces -10.7 32'27"9
Venus 01h01m40s 4°59'N Pisces -4.4 27"5

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

The sky on 22 May 2017

The sky on 22 May 2017
Sunrise
05:26
Sunset
20:11
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
03:28

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

10%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:31 11:12 17:53
Venus 03:32 09:53 16:14
Moon 03:36 09:55 16:24
Mars 06:36 14:11 21:46
Jupiter 15:52 21:41 03:30
Saturn 21:54 02:35 07:15
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

03 Feb 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
03 Jun 2017  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
02 Aug 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
06 Jun 2018  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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