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 56' 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 20:10 (EST), 39° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 57 minutes after the Sun at 23:50.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 03h28m30s 23°32'N Aries -10.6 30'36"2
Venus 03h28m30s 22°35'N Aries -4.4 25"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Mar 2028

The sky on 30 March 2028
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:26
Twilight begins
05:43

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

19%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:59 12:53 18:47
Venus 09:01 16:27 23:52
Moon 09:21 17:02 00:48
Mars 07:16 13:28 19:39
Jupiter 18:03 00:25 06:46
Saturn 08:11 14:44 21:16
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.

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24 Mar 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
11 Aug 2028  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
01 Sep 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Oct 2029  –  Venus at greatest elongation east

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
EST

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