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 Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The Moon, Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 1°48' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Los Angeles , the trio will become visible at around 18:35 (PDT), 22° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 33 minutes after the Sun at 20:52.

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 -10.7 in Scorpius; Venus will be at mag -4.3 in Scorpius; and Saturn will be at mag 0.4 in Ophiuchus.

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 16h21m30s 26°24'S Scorpius -10.7 31'06"4
Venus 16h18m40s 24°43'S Scorpius -4.3 22"7
Saturn 16h25m10s 20°05'S Ophiuchus 0.4 15"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 47° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jul 2024

The sky on 28 July 2024
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:56
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
04:21

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

39%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 14:35 21:02
Venus 07:11 13:59 20:46
Moon 23:58 06:58 14:09
Mars 01:37 08:38 15:40
Jupiter 02:08 09:14 16:19
Saturn 22:02 03:47 09:32
All times shown in PDT.

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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