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 44' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 28 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 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:05 (EDT) – 1 hour and 12 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:57.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.0, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 04h17m20s 19°14'N Taurus -9.0 30'13"1
Venus 04h17m20s 18°30'N Taurus -4.3 51"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Jun 2020

The sky on 19 June 2020
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:08

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:39 14:01 21:22
Venus 04:05 11:17 18:28
Moon 04:05 11:31 19:05
Mars 00:58 06:44 12:31
Jupiter 22:05 02:49 07:32
Saturn 22:23 03:12 08:00
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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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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