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 5°35' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 12 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:58 (EST), 16° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:33, 25° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:13, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.7, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 19h40m40s 16°20'S Sagittarius -12.7 32'59"7
Jupiter 19h40m40s 21°56'S Sagittarius -2.7 45"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 147° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 18 Aug 2032

The sky on 18 August 2032
Sunrise
05:51
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:25
Twilight begins
04:05


Waxing Gibbous

95%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:26 11:40 18:54
Venus 07:40 14:07 20:34
Moon 17:44 22:49 03:59
Mars 04:49 12:00 19:12
Jupiter 17:55 22:33 03:10
Saturn 01:37 09:09 16:41
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.

Related news

19 Jul 2032  –  Jupiter at opposition
17 Sep 2032  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
25 Jun 2033  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
25 Aug 2033  –  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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