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 1°37' to the north 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 Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:40 (EST), 18° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 6 minutes after the Sun at 22:25.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.1, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h34m30s 11°50'N Leo -10.5 32'46"3
Venus 10h34m30s 10°12'N Leo -4.1 17"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jul 2018

The sky on 15 July 2018
Sunrise
05:18
Sunset
20:19
Twilight ends
22:26
Twilight begins
03:11

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

17%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:38 14:34 21:30
Venus 09:00 15:42 22:24
Moon 08:19 15:24 22:20
Mars 21:29 01:55 06:21
Jupiter 14:45 19:53 01:00
Saturn 18:52 23:27 04:01
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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Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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