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

Close approach of Venus and M44

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Objects: M44 Venus
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The sky at

Venus and M44 will make a close approach, passing within a mere 43.1 arcminutes of each other.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 11° above the horizon at dusk.

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Venus will be at mag -4.0; and M44 will be at mag 3.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and M44 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
Venus 08h41m10s 20°21'N Cancer -4.0 14"8
M44 08h40m20s 19°40'N Cancer 3.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Jun 2026

The sky on 19 June 2026
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:08

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

36%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:10 14:36 22:02
Venus 08:20 15:39 22:59
Moon 10:25 17:21 00:04
Mars 03:15 10:24 17:34
Jupiter 07:36 14:59 22:21
Saturn 01:40 07:54 14:08
All times shown in EDT.

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.

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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