The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 3°42' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 19:42 (EDT), 13° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 34 minutes after the Sun at 21:00.

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 -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 13h52m50s 8°28'S Virgo -10.5 32'21"7
Venus 13h46m30s 11°49'S Virgo -4.1 16"0

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

The sky on 10 Sep 2021

The sky on 10 September 2021
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
19:26
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
05:12

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

16%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:01 14:39 20:17
Venus 10:14 15:38 21:01
Moon 10:38 16:15 21:42
Mars 07:30 13:39 19:49
Jupiter 18:21 23:36 04:50
Saturn 17:30 22:28 03:25
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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06 Dec 2021  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
16 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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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