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°41' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 4 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:45 (EDT), 24° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 41 minutes after the Sun at 23:05.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h07m50s 21°40'N Cancer -10.3 29'28"9
Venus 09h07m50s 17°59'N Cancer -4.4 29"3

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

The sky on 21 Jun 2023

The sky on 21 June 2023
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:39
Twilight begins
02:49

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

16%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:22 11:55 19:28
Venus 08:39 15:52 23:04
Moon 07:53 15:42 23:20
Mars 09:03 16:10 23:16
Jupiter 02:16 09:07 15:59
Saturn 23:59 05:23 10:48
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.

Related news

04 Jun 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
20 Oct 2023  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
23 Oct 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 Jan 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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
EDT

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