Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 1°58' of each other. The Moon will be 13 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:48 (EDT), 9° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:26, 26° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:10, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.6. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 17h11m10s 20°25'S Ophiuchus -12.6 30'49"0
Jupiter 17h09m50s 22°21'S Ophiuchus -2.6 44"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 173° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2019

The sky on 16 June 2019
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:36
Twilight begins
03:09


Waxing Gibbous

99%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 14:35 22:10
Venus 04:22 11:44 19:06
Moon 19:52 00:42 05:34
Mars 07:10 14:41 22:12
Jupiter 19:47 00:26 05:05
Saturn 21:54 02:36 07:17
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 Jun 2019  –  Jupiter at opposition
11 Aug 2019  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
14 May 2020  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
14 Jul 2020  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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