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, Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 6°19' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:39 (EST) – 1 hour and 53 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:14.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Saturn will be at mag 0.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

At around the same time, the trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 21h41m20s 19°16'S Capricornus -10.7 31'51"7
Venus 21h32m40s 13°17'S Capricornus -4.3 22"4
Saturn 21h36m20s 15°15'S Capricornus 0.7 15"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2022

The sky on 28 March 2022
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:41
Twilight begins
04:56

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 12:31 18:31
Venus 04:40 09:53 15:07
Moon 05:15 10:01 14:56
Mars 04:39 09:37 14:36
Jupiter 06:00 11:45 17:31
Saturn 04:51 09:56 15:02
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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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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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