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

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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°14' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:58 (EST) – 2 hours and 55 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 26° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:35.

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

The pair 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.

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 07h32m20s 18°53'N Gemini -10.1 32'36"0
Venus 07h32m20s 21°07'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 19 Aug 2017

The sky on 19 August 2017
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:24
Twilight begins
04:07

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 13:28 19:44
Venus 03:00 10:26 17:52
Moon 03:25 10:49 18:09
Mars 05:14 12:19 19:23
Jupiter 10:26 16:05 21:43
Saturn 15:33 20:11 00:48
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

02 Aug 2017  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
06 Jun 2018  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
17 Aug 2018  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
13 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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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