A low apparition of Venus on the 2nd January 2023

On Monday this week we had some nice clear conditions in the late afternoon and so I thought I would go out and see if I could find Venus and Mercury. In fact, it would have been virtually impossible to see Mercury as it was lost in the glare of the setting sun. You can use the BAA computing section's applet to find the position of the planets (and other objects) at any time. I did find Venus and so I got this image at 16:39 UT:-

This was about 34 minutes after sunset and Venus was about 4.4 degrees above the horizon (at this time Mercury was just 2.2 degrees above that level). This is looking almost SW. At the present time Venus is emerging from conjunction with the sun and will reach its greatest elongation east on June 4th. Its apparent diameter is quite a small 10.4 arc seconds and the phase is about 96%.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2023