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 23' to the north 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 Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:10 (EST) – 2 hours and 57 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 29° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:50.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Venus at mag -4.5, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 08h51m50s 12°23'N Cancer -10.1 29'37"9
Venus 08h51m50s 12°00'N Cancer -4.5 39"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Sep 2031

The sky on 13 September 2031
Sunrise
07:07
Sunset
19:44
Twilight ends
21:16
Twilight begins
05:34

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

7%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:20 12:54 19:28
Venus 04:10 10:54 17:38
Moon 04:11 11:03 17:47
Mars 14:04 18:39 23:14
Jupiter 14:36 19:17 23:58
Saturn 00:07 07:29 14:50
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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