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°36' to the north of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 16:58 (PDT), 8° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 7 minutes after the Sun at 17:47.

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 -8.4, and Venus at mag -4.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h36m00s 18°29'S Sagittarius -8.4 29'56"2
Venus 18h36m00s 23°05'S Sagittarius -4.3 1'00"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 21 Apr 2026

The sky on 21 April 2026
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
19:27
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:42

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

28%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:25 11:32 17:38
Venus 07:29 14:29 21:29
Moon 09:30 17:09 00:46
Mars 05:17 11:27 17:37
Jupiter 10:58 18:07 01:15
Saturn 05:18 11:24 17:30
All times shown in PDT.

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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05 May 2071  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky

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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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