The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 1°01' of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 19:22 (PDT), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 7 minutes after the Sun at 20:14.

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 will be at mag -3.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Venus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 12h28m40s 3°16'S Virgo -9.2 29'24"2
Venus 12h30m40s 2°21'S Virgo -3.9 11"1

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

The sky on 5 Sep 2024

The sky on 5 September 2024
Sunrise
06:23
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:31
Twilight begins
04:58

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:00 11:37 18:15
Venus 08:23 14:19 20:15
Moon 08:44 14:37 20:22
Mars 00:41 07:48 14:56
Jupiter 23:57 07:01 14:05
Saturn 19:17 01:00 06:43
All times shown in PDT.

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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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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