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 6°03' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 20:16 (EST), 35° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 19 minutes after the Sun at 23:20.

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 -10.2, and Venus at mag -4.5, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 05h00m10s 21°29'N Taurus -10.2 30'11"6
Venus 05h00m10s 27°33'N Taurus -4.5 36"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Apr 2020

The sky on 26 April 2020
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:27
Twilight begins
05:19

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

14%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:25 12:49 19:14
Venus 08:51 16:05 23:20
Moon 09:13 16:16 23:22
Mars 03:09 08:31 13:54
Jupiter 01:49 07:00 12:12
Saturn 02:08 07:22 12:35
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

24 Mar 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
13 Aug 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
26 Aug 2020  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
29 Oct 2021  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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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Jacksonville

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

30.33°N
81.66°W
EST

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