Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°29' of each other. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:16, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:48, 36° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:25, 16° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 22h18m30s 7°03'S Aquarius -12.7 32'51"2
Jupiter 22h23m50s 11°20'S Aquarius -2.9 47"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 164° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Aug 2033

The sky on 11 August 2033
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
19:50
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
03:54


Waning Gibbous

96%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:54 12:11 19:28
Venus 02:51 10:21 17:50
Moon 19:39 01:06 06:41
Mars 17:15 21:21 01:27
Jupiter 20:27 01:48 07:09
Saturn 02:58 10:29 17:59
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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02 Aug 2034  –  Jupiter enters 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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