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 52' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 18:38 (EDT), 29° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 37 minutes after the Sun at 21:01.

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 -10.0, and Venus at mag -4.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 01h06m40s 5°57'N Pisces -10.0 31'10"8
Venus 01h06m40s 6°50'N Pisces -4.0 13"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
21:58
Twilight begins
05:04

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

90%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:47 15:16 21:45
Venus 07:41 14:27 21:14
Moon 21:48 03:17 08:54
Mars 02:26 09:18 16:09
Jupiter 03:07 10:04 17:00
Saturn 22:54 04:41 10:29
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

06 Mar 2070  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
09 May 2071  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
21 May 2071  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
09 Oct 2071  –  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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Jacksonville

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EDT

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