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 1°29' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 17 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:02, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:08, 64° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:27, 16° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Leo.

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 09h46m20s 12°59'N Leo -12.8 33'01"9
Jupiter 09h46m20s 14°29'N Leo -2.5 43"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 158° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jan 2027

The sky on 23 January 2027
Sunrise
07:45
Sunset
17:39
Twilight ends
19:13
Twilight begins
06:11


Waning Gibbous

94%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:37 13:40 18:44
Venus 04:34 09:27 14:19
Moon 18:07 01:25 08:31
Mars 20:26 03:10 09:54
Jupiter 19:15 02:08 09:02
Saturn 10:49 16:57 23:05
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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12 Dec 2026  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Feb 2027  –  Jupiter at opposition
12 Apr 2027  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
12 Jan 2028  –  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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