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°16' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.4, 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 21h53m10s 17°08'S Capricornus -9.4 33'14"1
Venus 21h53m10s 13°52'S Capricornus -3.9 10"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Mar 2024

The sky on 8 March 2024
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
17:42
Twilight ends
19:16
Twilight begins
04:32

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 12:26 18:22
Venus 05:19 10:30 15:41
Moon 05:33 10:26 15:29
Mars 05:01 10:02 15:03
Jupiter 08:18 15:17 22:15
Saturn 05:58 11:27 16:56
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.

Related news

23 Oct 2023  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
10 Jan 2025  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
02 Feb 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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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