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°23' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 25 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:23 (EDT) – 2 hours and 1 minute before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:07.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, 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 21h46m40s 18°29'S Capricornus -10.9 30'39"4
Jupiter 21h46m40s 14°06'S Capricornus -2.1 34"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Apr 2021

The sky on 7 April 2021
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
19:24
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
04:47


Waning Crescent

17%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:08 12:14 18:19
Venus 06:39 13:07 19:35
Moon 04:46 09:49 14:58
Mars 09:26 17:04 00:41
Jupiter 04:23 09:35 14:48
Saturn 03:47 08:45 13:43
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

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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