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 1°00' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:34 (PDT) – 3 hours and 36 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 39° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:54.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h04m40s 1°50'N Virgo -10.6 29'47"0
Venus 12h04m40s 0°49'N Virgo -4.3 20"4

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

The sky on 9 Nov 2023

The sky on 9 November 2023
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
16:51
Twilight ends
18:15
Twilight begins
04:46

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:14 12:19 17:24
Venus 02:36 08:40 14:45
Moon 02:37 08:51 14:58
Mars 06:25 11:41 16:57
Jupiter 16:23 23:01 05:38
Saturn 13:15 18:44 00:12
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

23 Oct 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 Jan 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
30 Jan 2025  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
31 May 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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