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°23' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -8.8, 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 21h29m50s 10°05'S Capricornus -8.8 33'11"1
Jupiter 21h29m50s 15°28'S Capricornus -2.0 32"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Feb 2033

The sky on 27 February 2033
Sunrise
06:27
Sunset
17:40
Twilight ends
19:12
Twilight begins
04:56


Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:13 12:00 17:47
Venus 07:03 13:40 20:16
Moon 05:03 10:24 15:52
Mars 01:18 06:01 10:44
Jupiter 05:44 10:51 15:58
Saturn 11:50 19:19 02:48
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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25 Jun 2033  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
25 Aug 2033  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Oct 2033  –  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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