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 6°30' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:58 (EST), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 13 minutes after the Sun at 20:53.

The Moon will be at mag -10.0, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 11h59m10s 5°12'S Virgo -10.0 33'09"3
Jupiter 11h59m10s 1°18'N Virgo -1.7 30"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Aug 2028

The sky on 22 August 2028
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:21
Twilight begins
04:25


Waxing Crescent

11%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 14:20 20:32
Venus 02:30 09:48 17:07
Moon 08:56 14:49 20:31
Mars 02:51 10:20 17:48
Jupiter 08:38 14:45 20:53
Saturn 22:36 05:25 12:13
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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11 Apr 2029  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 Jun 2029  –  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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