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 5°22' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, 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 14h03m10s 16°49'S Virgo -8.9 33'20"9
Jupiter 14h03m10s 11°27'S Virgo -1.7 30"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 19° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Oct 2029

The sky on 8 October 2029
Sunrise
06:54
Sunset
18:22
Twilight ends
19:54
Twilight begins
05:22


Waxing Crescent

4%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 11:45 17:54
Venus 10:59 15:35 20:11
Moon 08:04 13:21 18:30
Mars 11:40 16:16 20:51
Jupiter 08:22 13:45 19:07
Saturn 20:09 03:12 10:14
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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.

Related news

13 Jun 2029  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Mar 2030  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
13 May 2030  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Jul 2030  –  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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