Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°05' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:16 (EST) – 1 hour and 24 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:21.

The Moon will be at mag -8.6, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Libra.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 Jupiter 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 14h23m10s 9°05'S Libra -8.6 30'00"1
Jupiter 14h23m10s 13°10'S Libra -1.7 30"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Nov 2017

The sky on 16 November 2017
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
16:33
Twilight ends
18:08
Twilight begins
05:04


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:35 13:02 17:29
Venus 05:33 10:46 15:58
Moon 04:40 10:20 15:54
Mars 03:23 09:08 14:53
Jupiter 05:16 10:32 15:48
Saturn 09:12 13:51 18:30
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

09 Jun 2017  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Mar 2018  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 May 2018  –  Jupiter at opposition
10 Jul 2018  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

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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