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°26' to the south 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 16:43 (EST), 30° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 53 minutes after the Sun at 20:16.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h10m40s 13°58'S Aquarius -10.7 31'53"4
Venus 22h10m40s 12°32'S Aquarius -4.4 22"8

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

The sky on 3 Jan 2025

The sky on 3 January 2025
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:30

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

19%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:45 10:20 14:55
Venus 09:44 15:00 20:17
Moon 09:58 15:10 20:33
Mars 17:27 01:07 08:46
Jupiter 14:04 21:33 05:02
Saturn 10:21 15:55 21:28
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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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

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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