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, Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 7°34' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will become visible at around 16:30 (EST), 20° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 9 minutes after the Sun at 19:19.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7 in Sagittarius; Venus will be at mag -4.2 in Sagittarius; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1 in Capricornus.

They 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.

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 19h59m40s 15°20'S Sagittarius -10.7 32'07"2
Venus 20h06m10s 22°45'S Sagittarius -4.2 18"1
Jupiter 20h11m50s 20°32'S Capricornus -2.1 33"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Dec 2032

The sky on 6 December 2032
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
16:10
Twilight ends
17:51
Twilight begins
05:15

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

18%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:19 10:15 15:12
Venus 10:13 14:47 19:21
Moon 09:56 15:07 20:24
Mars 02:32 08:07 13:41
Jupiter 10:08 14:52 19:36
Saturn 17:30 01:02 08:34
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.

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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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