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 1°11' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:44 (EDT) – 1 hour and 55 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:23.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.3; and Venus will be at mag -4.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h13m30s 20°23'S Capricornus -10.3 29'27"7
Venus 20h12m50s 19°12'S Capricornus -4.1 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Mar 2019

The sky on 2 March 2019
Sunrise
06:39
Sunset
18:02
Twilight ends
19:31
Twilight begins
05:10

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 13:20 19:28
Venus 04:43 09:41 14:38
Moon 04:30 09:27 14:26
Mars 09:04 16:00 22:56
Jupiter 02:09 06:54 11:39
Saturn 03:58 08:45 13:33
All times shown in EST.

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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24 Mar 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
26 Mar 2020  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
13 Aug 2020  –  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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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