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°07' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:02 (PDT) – 2 hours and 48 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:33.

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 -10.3, 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, 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 04h48m00s 20°59'N Taurus -10.3 30'25"1
Venus 04h48m00s 17°52'N Taurus -4.5 33"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2020

The sky on 17 July 2020
Sunrise
05:50
Sunset
19:56
Twilight ends
21:34
Twilight begins
04:12

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:35 11:32 18:28
Venus 03:03 09:54 16:44
Moon 03:00 10:14 17:32
Mars 23:45 05:51 11:56
Jupiter 19:37 00:39 05:42
Saturn 20:02 01:09 06:16
All times shown in PDT.

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

25 Mar 2020  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
13 Aug 2020  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
29 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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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