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°19' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:28 (EDT), 16° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 57 minutes after the Sun at 19:07.

The Moon will be at mag -9.2, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h37m30s 14°02'S Aquarius -9.2 32'07"1
Jupiter 22h37m30s 9°42'S Aquarius -2.0 32"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Feb 2022

The sky on 2 February 2022
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
17:10
Twilight ends
18:44
Twilight begins
05:26


Waxing Crescent

6%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:48 10:44 15:39
Venus 04:44 09:48 14:52
Moon 08:18 13:32 18:56
Mars 04:56 09:29 14:02
Jupiter 08:10 13:38 19:07
Saturn 07:12 12:13 17:15
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.

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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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