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°52' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 5 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 become visible at around 20:40 (EST), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 50 minutes after the Sun at 00:09.

The Moon will be at mag -11.3, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, 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 09h35m30s 13°27'N Leo -11.3 32'31"9
Jupiter 09h35m30s 15°19'N Leo -1.9 33"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 63° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Jun 2027

The sky on 9 June 2027
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:19
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
02:52


Waxing Crescent

33%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:24 13:58 21:32
Venus 04:11 11:29 18:48
Moon 10:35 17:31 00:13
Mars 11:48 18:22 00:57
Jupiter 10:06 17:08 00:09
Saturn 02:37 09:07 15:37
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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13 May 2028  –  Jupiter ends 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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