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 3°10' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 8 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 20:57 (EST), 30° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:39.

The Moon will be at mag -12.0, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, 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 15h03m30s 19°32'S Libra -12.0 32'15"6
Jupiter 15h03m30s 16°22'S Libra -2.1 37"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 94° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Aug 2030

The sky on 6 August 2030
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
20:39
Twilight ends
22:25
Twilight begins
04:45


Waxing Gibbous

59%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:53 15:15 21:36
Venus 04:54 12:14 19:35
Moon 14:28 19:28 00:23
Mars 04:49 12:13 19:36
Jupiter 14:27 19:33 00:39
Saturn 01:39 08:52 16:05
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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15 Apr 2031  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
15 Jun 2031  –  Jupiter at opposition
16 Aug 2031  –  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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