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 1°09' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 25 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:11 (EST) – 3 hours and 44 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:36.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Venus at mag -4.6, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair 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.

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 13h56m20s 8°25'S Virgo -10.5 29'34"1
Venus 13h56m20s 9°35'S Virgo -4.6 34"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair 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 2034

The sky on 6 December 2034
Sunrise
06:55
Sunset
16:10
Twilight ends
17:51
Twilight begins
05:14

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:14 11:42 16:10
Venus 03:11 08:38 14:06
Moon 02:49 08:29 14:02
Mars 03:43 08:58 14:14
Jupiter 12:53 18:56 01:00
Saturn 19:52 03:11 10:29
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.

Related news

12 Aug 2034  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
09 Dec 2034  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky
01 Jan 2035  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
19 Mar 2036  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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