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°27' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 17:28 (PDT), 15° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 40 minutes after the Sun at 18:52.

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 -9.2, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h51m10s 18°08'S Capricornus -9.2 33'17"5
Venus 21h51m10s 14°40'S Capricornus -3.9 10"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 21° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jan 2023

The sky on 23 January 2023
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
17:12
Twilight ends
18:37
Twilight begins
05:20

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

5%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 10:18 15:23
Venus 08:05 13:30 18:55
Moon 08:36 14:00 19:32
Mars 12:49 20:01 03:12
Jupiter 09:49 15:53 21:58
Saturn 08:01 13:25 18:50
All times shown in PST.

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

20 Mar 2022  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
12 May 2023  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
04 Jun 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
21 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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San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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