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 Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon, Venus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 1°56' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:20 (EST) – 1 hour and 52 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:51.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Venus will be at mag -4.3; and Neptune will be at mag 7.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

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 01h06m30s 7°16'N Pisces -10.7 32'40"4
Venus 01h08m50s 5°25'N Pisces -4.3 25"2
Neptune 01h11m30s 5°52'N Pisces 7.9 2"2

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

The sky on 24 May 2033

The sky on 24 May 2033
Sunrise
05:12
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
22:11
Twilight begins
03:07

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 13:56 21:42
Venus 03:19 09:41 16:04
Moon 02:48 09:10 15:41
Mars 23:06 03:28 07:50
Jupiter 01:40 07:04 12:29
Saturn 07:23 14:57 22:30
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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04 Jun 2034  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening 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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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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