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 and Venus

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Venus will make a close approach, passing within 6°47' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:32 (EDT), 13° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 37 minutes after the Sun at 20:51.

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 -10.5; and Venus will be at mag -4.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 13h49m10s 5°50'S Virgo -10.5 29'42"7
Venus 13h39m10s 12°10'S Virgo -4.2 20"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Jun 2024

The sky on 30 June 2024
Sunrise
05:21
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:13

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

26%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 14:10 21:40
Venus 05:54 13:26 20:58
Moon 01:11 08:04 15:12
Mars 02:10 09:09 16:08
Jupiter 03:19 10:40 18:02
Saturn 23:58 05:40 11:21
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.

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10 Feb 2150  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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