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 3°27' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 21:21 (EST), 33° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 02:24.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

They 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.

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 14h57m40s 19°26'S Libra -12.4 32'37"2
Jupiter 15h00m40s 16°02'S Libra -2.3 40"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 119° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Jul 2030

The sky on 10 July 2030
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
21:01
Twilight ends
23:01
Twilight begins
04:09


Waxing Gibbous

79%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:33 14:50 22:06
Venus 04:16 11:39 19:03
Moon 16:40 21:35 02:26
Mars 05:10 12:42 20:13
Jupiter 16:09 21:16 02:24
Saturn 03:17 10:28 17:39
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 2030  –  Jupiter at opposition
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15 Apr 2031  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
15 Jun 2031  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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