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 3°46' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.0, 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 15h51m00s 15°39'S Libra -8.0 30'49"2
Jupiter 15h51m00s 19°26'S Libra -1.7 30"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Nov 2018

The sky on 8 November 2018
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
16:40
Twilight ends
18:15
Twilight begins
04:55


Waxing Crescent

2%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:39 13:08 17:38
Venus 04:58 10:14 15:30
Moon 07:20 12:32 17:38
Mars 13:24 18:33 23:43
Jupiter 07:41 12:32 17:24
Saturn 10:26 15:04 19:41
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

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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