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 Moon, Venus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 5°59' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the trio will become visible at around 18:00 (EST), 38° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 51 minutes after the Sun at 21:34.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; 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 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 01h44m50s 5°54'N Pisces -10.6 30'51"4
Venus 01h37m20s 11°37'N Pisces -4.3 19"7
Neptune 01h24m30s 7°07'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 Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:11

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

42%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:37 13:04 17:30
Venus 10:14 14:41 19:08
Moon 23:20 06:15 12:58
Mars 20:49 04:12 11:35
Jupiter 17:22 00:49 08:16
Saturn 13:05 18:37 00:09
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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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