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 4'49" to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 1 days old.

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

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 3° above the horizon at dusk.

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The Moon will be at mag -7.9, and Venus at mag -3.9, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 08h29m30s 20°18'N Cancer -7.9 30'54"0
Venus 08h29m30s 20°23'N Cancer -3.9 9"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2024

The sky on 4 July 2024
Sunrise
05:10
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
02:57

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:49 14:15 21:40
Venus 05:49 13:23 20:57
Moon 03:20 11:36 19:55
Mars 01:50 08:56 16:02
Jupiter 02:54 10:20 17:46
Saturn 23:35 05:15 10:56
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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26 Jan 2057  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
22 May 2057  –  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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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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