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 1°24' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:55 (EST) – 2 hours and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:01.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Venus at mag -4.5, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h42m10s 18°37'S Sagittarius -10.6 31'33"5
Venus 19h42m10s 17°13'S Sagittarius -4.5 30"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Feb 2030

The sky on 28 February 2030
Sunrise
06:19
Sunset
17:31
Twilight ends
19:05
Twilight begins
04:45

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 11:28 16:44
Venus 03:55 08:53 13:51
Moon 04:03 08:53 13:49
Mars 07:10 13:12 19:13
Jupiter 23:58 04:51 09:43
Saturn 09:16 16:18 23:20
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

14 Feb 2030  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
18 Mar 2030  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
07 May 2031  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
02 Jun 2031  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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