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 and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 1°14' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 7° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.9; and Venus will be at mag -3.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 22h57m10s 6°36'S Aquarius -9.9 31'23"3
Venus 22h58m30s 7°47'S Aquarius -3.9 12"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Apr 2035

The sky on 5 April 2035
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:51
Twilight begins
04:40

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:24 12:46 19:07
Venus 05:12 10:46 16:20
Moon 04:55 10:29 16:09
Mars 03:00 07:37 12:14
Jupiter 06:44 13:18 19:51
Saturn 12:22 19:48 03:14
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

01 Jan 2035  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
19 Mar 2036  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
22 Mar 2036  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
08 Aug 2036  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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
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