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, Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°59' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will become visible at around 17:50 (EDT), 35° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 39 minutes after the Sun at 21:11.

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 -10.5; Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

At around the same time, the trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 01h22m20s 14°12'N Pisces -10.5 29'55"3
Venus 01h29m40s 10°38'N Pisces -4.2 19"0
Saturn 01h33m50s 7°19'N Pisces 0.4 16"6

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

The sky on 29 Feb 2028

The sky on 29 February 2028
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
17:32
Twilight ends
19:06
Twilight begins
04:45

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

17%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:15 10:12 15:10
Venus 07:55 14:38 21:22
Moon 07:38 14:46 22:05
Mars 06:35 12:13 17:50
Jupiter 18:32 00:49 07:06
Saturn 08:11 14:41 21:12
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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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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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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