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 6°34' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 5 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 21:23 (EST), 24° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 23:40.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.4, and Venus at mag -4.4, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h11m30s 10°52'N Cancer -10.4 29'34"8
Venus 09h11m30s 17°26'N Cancer -4.4 31"2

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

The sky on 23 Jun 2031

The sky on 23 June 2031
Sunrise
06:00
Sunset
21:03
Twilight ends
23:07
Twilight begins
03:57

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

18%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:12 14:44 22:16
Venus 09:30 16:35 23:39
Moon 09:34 16:26 23:09
Mars 16:18 21:31 02:45
Jupiter 20:14 00:55 05:36
Saturn 05:00 12:19 19:38
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.

Related news

02 Jun 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
19 Oct 2031  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
21 Oct 2031  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
07 Jan 2033  –  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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