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 3°44' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:19 (EST), 11° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 20 minutes after the Sun at 20:22.

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 -8.3 in the constellation Cetus, and Venus at mag -3.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Pisces.

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 00h54m30s 1°03'N Cetus -8.3 31'05"8
Venus 00h54m30s 4°47'N Pisces -3.9 10"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Mar 2018

The sky on 18 March 2018
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:35
Twilight begins
05:25

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:27 14:00 20:33
Venus 07:42 14:02 20:21
Moon 07:54 14:00 20:14
Mars 02:36 07:10 11:44
Jupiter 23:32 04:32 09:32
Saturn 03:04 07:44 12:23
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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.

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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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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