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 5°26' 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 Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:23 (EST), 30° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 22 minutes after the Sun at 20:27.

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 -10.4 in the constellation Pisces, and Venus at mag -4.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair 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.

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 23h25m50s 0°46'N Pisces -10.4 29'29"9
Venus 23h25m50s 4°39'S Aquarius -4.1 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 42° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jan 2028

The sky on 30 January 2028
Sunrise
07:04
Sunset
17:05
Twilight ends
18:40
Twilight begins
05:29

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

16%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:08 12:24 17:40
Venus 08:54 14:41 20:28
Moon 08:42 14:50 21:08
Mars 07:42 12:49 17:56
Jupiter 20:54 03:06 09:18
Saturn 10:13 16:39 23:04
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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Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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