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 2°07' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:02 (EST), 22° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:55, 47° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:06, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h03m00s 3°39'S Pisces -12.5 31'30"9
Jupiter 23h59m00s 1°46'S Pisces -2.8 46"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 136° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Nov 2022

The sky on 4 November 2022
Sunrise
07:25
Sunset
17:44
Twilight ends
19:18
Twilight begins
05:51


Waxing Gibbous

90%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 12:26 17:38
Venus 07:42 12:48 17:55
Moon 16:15 22:06 04:08
Mars 20:02 03:37 11:12
Jupiter 15:58 21:55 03:51
Saturn 14:18 19:21 00:24
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.

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03 Nov 2023  –  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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