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 6°33' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:06 (EST) – 2 hours and 49 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 19° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:36.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 17h55m00s 27°33'S Sagittarius -10.5 29'26"0
Venus 17h53m20s 21°00'S Sagittarius -4.2 18"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Feb 2027

The sky on 2 February 2027
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
16:58
Twilight ends
18:34
Twilight begins
05:18

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:43 13:07 18:30
Venus 04:06 08:48 13:29
Moon 04:40 08:48 12:57
Mars 18:42 01:35 08:27
Jupiter 17:37 00:37 07:36
Saturn 09:23 15:33 21:43
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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21 Mar 2028  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
24 Mar 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Aug 2028  –  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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