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 3°18' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 19 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:32, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:44, 62° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:52, 59° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.3, and Jupiter at mag -2.7, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h52m40s 18°26'N Aries -12.3 31'35"2
Jupiter 02h52m40s 15°08'N Aries -2.7 43"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 115° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Sep 2023

The sky on 4 September 2023
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:52
Twilight begins
04:30


Waning Gibbous

66%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:37 12:48 18:59
Venus 03:57 10:40 17:22
Moon 21:10 04:18 11:41
Mars 08:10 14:08 20:06
Jupiter 21:43 04:44 11:44
Saturn 18:56 00:14 05:32
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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04 Sep 2023  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
03 Nov 2023  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Dec 2023  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 Oct 2024  –  Jupiter enters 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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