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°07' to the north 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 Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 17:33 (EDT), 21° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 45 minutes after the Sun at 19:59.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Venus at mag -4.0, 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 21h06m00s 15°25'S Capricornus -10.0 29'29"0
Venus 21h06m00s 18°32'S Capricornus -4.0 13"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Dec 2027

The sky on 30 December 2027
Sunrise
07:50
Sunset
17:14
Twilight ends
18:52
Twilight begins
06:13

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

12%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:45 13:20 17:55
Venus 10:02 15:00 19:57
Moon 09:41 14:49 20:05
Mars 09:06 13:51 18:35
Jupiter 23:36 05:47 11:58
Saturn 12:53 19:15 01:37
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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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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Columbus

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

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