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

Close approach of Venus and M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Objects: M44 Venus
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

Venus and M44 will make a close approach, passing within 1°10' of each other.

From Ashburn , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 17° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:55 (EDT) – 2 hours and 41 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 17° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:35.

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

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and M44 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
Venus 08h39m10s 18°31'N Cancer -4.0 12"3
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 31° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2017

The sky on 1 September 2017
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:14
Twilight begins
05:02

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

82%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:54 12:27 19:00
Venus 03:59 11:05 18:12
Moon 16:46 21:50 02:56
Mars 05:37 12:25 19:13
Jupiter 10:09 15:47 21:26
Saturn 14:58 19:45 00:32
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.

Image credit

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

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme