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°40' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 27 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:19 (EDT) – 1 hour and 14 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:16.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h37m40s 12°21'S Aquarius -10.0 29'29"7
Venus 22h37m40s 9°41'S Aquarius -4.0 13"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Apr 2019

The sky on 2 April 2019
Sunrise
06:33
Sunset
19:18
Twilight ends
20:53
Twilight begins
04:58

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

6%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:40 11:23 17:06
Venus 05:20 10:50 16:19
Moon 05:39 11:08 16:44
Mars 08:42 16:05 23:28
Jupiter 01:07 05:45 10:23
Saturn 02:53 07:35 12:18
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.

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06 Jan 2019  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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