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°02' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:21 (EDT) – 1 hour and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:00.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.3, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h46m20s 23°37'S Libra -9.3 32'05"0
Venus 15h46m20s 18°35'S Libra -4.0 11"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Dec 2028

The sky on 14 December 2028
Sunrise
07:18
Sunset
16:47
Twilight ends
18:23
Twilight begins
05:42

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:29 13:02 17:34
Venus 05:23 10:23 15:22
Moon 05:54 10:41 15:25
Mars 00:12 06:26 12:40
Jupiter 02:20 07:59 13:37
Saturn 14:07 20:45 03:23
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.

Related news

01 Sep 2028  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
27 Oct 2029  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
03 Dec 2029  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
14 Feb 2030  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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