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°03' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:58 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 42° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:50.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3. 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 02h31m20s 15°49'N Aries -11.4 31'02"8
Jupiter 02h34m40s 13°56'N Aries -2.3 36"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jul 2023

The sky on 11 July 2023
Sunrise
06:10
Sunset
21:01
Twilight ends
23:00
Twilight begins
04:10


Waning Crescent

26%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:05 14:27 21:49
Venus 09:22 16:05 22:48
Moon 01:39 08:31 15:34
Mars 09:40 16:25 23:10
Jupiter 01:58 08:49 15:41
Saturn 23:24 04:51 10:17
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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