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°40' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:16 (EST) – 1 hour and 32 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:30.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, 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 19h21m10s 17°29'S Sagittarius -9.9 33'11"8
Jupiter 19h21m10s 22°10'S Sagittarius -1.9 32"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Feb 2032

The sky on 8 February 2032
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
17:05
Twilight ends
18:41
Twilight begins
05:12


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:12 12:18 17:23
Venus 05:20 09:59 14:37
Moon 04:25 09:17 14:12
Mars 08:31 14:34 20:37
Jupiter 05:16 09:52 14:28
Saturn 12:01 19:28 02:54
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.

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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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