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°40' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 16:42 (EST), 13° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 53 minutes after the Sun at 18:16.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 20h37m00s 13°28'S Capricornus -9.5 32'38"5
Jupiter 20h37m00s 19°08'S Capricornus -2.0 32"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jan 2033

The sky on 3 January 2033
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:29


Waxing Crescent

7%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 11:23 15:48
Venus 09:43 15:00 20:17
Moon 08:34 13:53 19:20
Mars 02:09 07:21 12:33
Jupiter 08:37 13:27 18:16
Saturn 15:26 22:58 06:30
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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