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°14' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:31 (PDT) – 2 hours and 41 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:56.

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 will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h31m30s 18°54'N Gemini -10.1 32'36"0
Venus 07h32m10s 21°08'N Gemini -4.0 13"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Aug 2017

The sky on 18 August 2017
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
20:58
Twilight begins
04:43

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

5%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 13:37 19:49
Venus 03:29 10:29 17:30
Moon 02:51 10:01 17:11
Mars 05:38 12:24 19:10
Jupiter 10:26 16:12 21:57
Saturn 15:15 20:18 01:22
All times shown in PDT.

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 Jul 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
13 Jun 2018  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
17 Aug 2018  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
15 Dec 2018  –  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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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