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 2°20' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 11 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:41 (EST), 21° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:14, 25° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:54, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 16h57m10s 19°48'S Ophiuchus -12.5 30'41"8
Jupiter 16h57m10s 22°09'S Ophiuchus -2.5 43"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 144° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Jul 2019

The sky on 13 July 2019
Sunrise
05:16
Sunset
20:21
Twilight ends
22:28
Twilight begins
03:08


Waxing Gibbous

93%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:33 13:36 20:38
Venus 04:35 12:11 19:47
Moon 17:43 22:29 03:12
Mars 06:39 13:58 21:17
Jupiter 17:38 22:14 02:51
Saturn 19:56 00:33 05:10
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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