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°38' to the south 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 Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:47 (EDT) – 3 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:56.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.3, and Venus at mag -4.1, 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 14h15m40s 14°51'S Virgo -10.3 30'36"0
Venus 14h15m40s 11°12'S Virgo -4.1 16"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Dec 2023

The sky on 9 December 2023
Sunrise
07:14
Sunset
16:46
Twilight ends
18:22
Twilight begins
05:38

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:52 13:28 18:03
Venus 03:47 09:13 14:39
Moon 03:40 09:07 14:26
Mars 06:47 11:33 16:18
Jupiter 14:28 21:12 03:56
Saturn 11:50 17:11 22:33
All times shown in EST.

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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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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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