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°02' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:51 (EST) – 1 hour and 11 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:45.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h24m20s 19°54'S Capricornus -9.9 30'51"6
Jupiter 21h24m20s 15°51'S Capricornus -2.0 32"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 33° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Mar 2021

The sky on 10 March 2021
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
17:44
Twilight ends
19:18
Twilight begins
04:29


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:06 10:13 15:21
Venus 06:03 11:41 17:19
Moon 05:09 09:52 14:42
Mars 09:02 16:34 00:05
Jupiter 04:51 09:54 14:58
Saturn 04:24 09:17 14:10
All times shown in EST.

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

12 Sep 2020  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
20 Jun 2021  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 2021  –  Jupiter at opposition
18 Oct 2021  –  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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