Two of the brightest objects in the night sky are about to stage one of April’s most beautiful displays. A delicate waxing crescent moon will shine alongside the planet Venus low in the west after sunset on Saturday, April 18, and Sunday, April 19, creating a striking twilight scene visible to the naked eye anywhere with a clear western horizon.
A delicate waxing crescent moon will shine alongside the planet Venus low in the west after sunset on Saturday, April 18, and Sunday, April 19,
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On Saturday, April 18, a 4%-lit waxing crescent Moon will sit about 5 degrees from Venus, low in the west, about 40 minutes after sunset.
On Sunday, April 19, the moon will be around 9%-lit and shine above Venus, with the Pleiades open cluster of stars — also known as the Seven Sisters — visible nearby in a deeper twilight.
Venus shines at magnitude -3.8 and will remain visible for about an hour after sunset, easily outshining every star in the sky.
Comet Pan-STARRS, also known as comet C/2025 R3 (Pan-STARRS), is visible in binoculars from the Northern Hemisphere until April 20. Look low in the eastern sky about two hours before sunrise.
Skywatchers can see the crescent moon, Venus and the Pleiades in the west after sunset on Saturday, April 18, and On Sunday, April 19,, 2026.
Stellarium
The moon reaches its new phase on Friday, April 17, making the following evenings ideal for spotting a razor-thin crescent moon just after sunset. Through binoculars, Earthshine may softly illuminate the moon’s darkened limb, while a small telescope will reveal Venus itself as a tiny crescent — a reminder that it, too, has phases. Venus, now firmly established as the “Evening Star,” is climbing higher in twilight and steadily brightening. It will remain in the post-sunset night sky through October, reaching maximum brilliancy on September 19 before slipping into the sun’s glare as it undertakes Earth’s orbit around the sun. From November onward, it will climb into the pre-dawn sky.
Known as M45 to astronomers, the Pleiades open cluster of stars is in the constellation Taurus, around 440 light-years from the solar system. The Pleiades contains about 1,000 stars born together from the same cloud of gas and dust. However, only six or seven of its brightest members are visible to the naked eye — hence its nickname, the Seven Sisters. At a mere 100 million years old, the stars of the Pleiades are extremely young compared to the many billion-year-old stars in the night sky — including our 4.6 billion-year-old sun.
After the conjunction of the moon and Venus, skywatchers’ attention will shift to the Lyrid meteor shower, which peaks on April 22. The Lyrids typically produce 15-20 meteors per hour under dark skies, and with a waxing crescent moon setting early, the post-midnight sky — the best time to see “shooting stars” — will be largely free of glare. The best time to look from North America will be the pre-dawn hours of April 22 and 23. The shower’s radiant lies near the bright star Vega in the northeast after midnight, but meteors can streak anywhere across the sky.
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