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 2°06' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 20 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:44, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:25, 25° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:59, 25° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 17h53m30s 20°47'S Sagittarius -12.4 32'25"3
Jupiter 17h53m30s 22°53'S Sagittarius -2.3 40"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 113° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Apr 2031

The sky on 12 April 2031
Sunrise
06:16
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
21:06
Twilight begins
04:38


Waning Gibbous

64%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:44 12:01 18:19
Venus 08:00 15:27 22:53
Moon 00:15 05:01 09:49
Mars 21:39 02:43 07:46
Jupiter 00:48 05:25 10:02
Saturn 08:29 15:45 23:02
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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14 Jul 2030  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
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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