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 3°41' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:31 (EDT), 10° above your north-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 29 minutes after the Sun at 21:41.

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 -8.3, and Venus at mag -4.2, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 05h12m00s 22°04'N Taurus -8.3 30'21"5
Venus 05h12m00s 25°46'N Taurus -4.2 54"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 May 2020

The sky on 23 May 2020
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
22:11
Twilight begins
03:26

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 14:10 21:52
Venus 06:14 13:58 21:42
Moon 06:06 13:37 21:16
Mars 02:00 07:24 12:48
Jupiter 23:57 04:42 09:28
Saturn 00:13 05:02 09:52
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

26 Mar 2020  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
13 Aug 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
02 Sep 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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Fairfield

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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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