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 1°22' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:39 (EDT) – 2 hours and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

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 02h13m10s 13°40'N Aries -10.6 31'08"7
Jupiter 02h15m30s 12°25'N Aries -2.2 34"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Jun 2023

The sky on 14 June 2023
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:06
Twilight begins
04:44


Waning Crescent

12%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:18 12:09 19:00
Venus 09:46 16:38 23:31
Moon 03:40 10:27 17:23
Mars 10:17 17:03 23:49
Jupiter 03:39 10:12 16:44
Saturn 00:55 06:33 12:11
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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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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