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 4°05' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 26 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:21 (EST) – 3 hours and 54 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:56.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h11m30s 20°53'S Libra -10.9 32'43"0
Jupiter 15h11m30s 16°47'S Libra -1.8 32"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 31 Dec 2029

The sky on 31 December 2029
Sunrise
07:15
Sunset
16:33
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:36


Waning Crescent

12%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:04 11:51 16:38
Venus 07:39 12:33 17:26
Moon 03:35 08:24 13:09
Mars 09:20 14:18 19:16
Jupiter 03:21 08:23 13:25
Saturn 13:17 20:14 03:12
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.

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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