Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed
The Moon and Venus will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°10' to the south of Venus. The Moon will be 26 days old.
From Ashburn (click to change), the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 14° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:42 (EDT) – 1 hour and 40 minutes before the Sun – and reach an altitude of 14° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:03.
The pair 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.
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 coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
|The sky on 23 April 2017|
26 days old
All times shown in EDT.
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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.
|12 Jan 2017, 10:52 EST||– Venus at greatest elongation east|
|03 Jun 2017, 01:58 EDT||– Venus at greatest elongation west|
|17 Aug 2018, 03:58 EDT||– Venus at greatest elongation east|
|06 Jan 2019, 01:02 EST||– Venus at greatest elongation west|
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.