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 and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 51.9 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 19:19 (EST), 29° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 3 minutes after the Sun at 22:05.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.1; and Venus will be at mag -4.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

They 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.

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 02h33m20s 16°41'N Aries -10.1 30'23"0
Venus 02h34m10s 15°50'N Aries -4.0 13"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Mar 2031

The sky on 26 March 2031
Sunrise
06:35
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:37
Twilight begins
05:00

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

12%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:51 13:34 20:17
Venus 08:00 15:04 22:08
Moon 08:17 15:34 22:56
Mars 22:46 03:46 08:47
Jupiter 01:47 06:20 10:53
Saturn 09:19 16:37 23:55
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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19 Oct 2031  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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