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°19' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:48 (EST), 22° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 32 minutes after the Sun at 22:59.

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 -10.3; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. 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 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 08h20m50s 19°11'N Cancer -10.3 33'02"4
Venus 08h22m10s 21°29'N Cancer -4.0 14"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2018

The sky on 16 June 2018
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:09

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

14%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:06 13:46 21:27
Venus 08:12 15:35 22:59
Moon 08:28 15:52 23:09
Mars 23:21 04:02 08:43
Jupiter 16:49 21:59 03:08
Saturn 21:03 01:42 06:21
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

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
06 Jan 2019  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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