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°30' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 6 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:07 (EST), 26° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 18 minutes after the Sun at 23:07.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, 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 14h51m40s 11°00'S Libra -11.6 30'47"8
Jupiter 14h51m40s 15°30'S Libra -2.0 35"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 79° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Aug 2018

The sky on 17 August 2018
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:32
Twilight begins
04:18


Waxing Crescent

46%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 12:01 18:55
Venus 10:00 15:44 21:27
Moon 13:01 18:24 23:40
Mars 18:57 23:17 03:37
Jupiter 12:52 18:00 23:07
Saturn 16:40 21:18 01:56
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.

Related news

10 Jul 2018  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
10 Apr 2019  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Jun 2019  –  Jupiter at opposition
11 Aug 2019  –  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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