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

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

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 20:15 (PDT), 26° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 34 minutes after the Sun at 22:32.

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 at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h22m20s 19°08'N Cancer -10.3 33'02"1
Venus 08h22m20s 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 38° 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
05:38
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
03:56

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

14%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:29 13:43 20:56
Venus 08:30 15:31 22:33
Moon 08:46 15:55 22:58
Mars 22:54 03:57 09:00
Jupiter 16:30 21:54 03:17
Saturn 20:36 01:37 06:39
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

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
05 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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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