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°23' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:18 (EST) – 1 hour and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:36.

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

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 23h43m50s 6°37'S Aquarius -10.5 31'04"1
Venus 23h37m50s 3°36'S Aquarius -4.1 17"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Apr 2022

The sky on 27 April 2022
Sunrise
05:54
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:30
Twilight begins
04:09

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

10%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 14:08 21:34
Venus 04:19 10:10 16:01
Moon 04:47 10:32 16:28
Mars 03:46 09:16 14:45
Jupiter 04:26 10:21 16:16
Saturn 03:06 08:16 13:27
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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08 May 2023  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
04 Jun 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
20 Oct 2023  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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