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 1°29' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Jacksonville , 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 06:12 (EST) – 1 hour and 10 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 9° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:06.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.7, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h16m00s 24°40'S Sagittarius -8.7 32'17"2
Venus 18h16m00s 23°11'S Sagittarius -3.9 10"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jan 2021

The sky on 11 January 2021
Sunrise
07:22
Sunset
17:44
Twilight ends
19:09
Twilight begins
05:57

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:20 13:31 18:43
Venus 06:11 11:16 16:21
Moon 05:59 11:06 16:11
Mars 12:23 18:57 01:31
Jupiter 08:15 13:30 18:45
Saturn 08:06 13:20 18:34
All times shown in EST.

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.

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30 Nov 2021  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
22 Feb 2022  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EST

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