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 6°23' of each other. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:55, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:42, 39° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:10, 11° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

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 13h20m40s 13°43'S Virgo -12.8 33'25"4
Jupiter 13h29m50s 7°44'S Virgo -2.4 43"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 165° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Mar 2029

The sky on 30 March 2029
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:44
Twilight begins
04:51


Waning Gibbous

96%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:42 13:03 19:24
Venus 06:39 12:55 19:10
Moon 19:04 00:44 06:13
Mars 18:17 00:27 06:37
Jupiter 20:08 01:42 07:17
Saturn 07:52 14:42 21:33
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 Jun 2029  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Mar 2030  –  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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