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°46' of each other. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:32 (EST), 9° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 23:53, 36° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:22, when they sink below 7° 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 22h05m00s 8°03'S Aquarius -12.7 32'57"6
Jupiter 22h10m30s 12°38'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 7 Sep 2033

The sky on 7 September 2033
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
19:15
Twilight ends
20:50
Twilight begins
04:46


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:42 13:46 19:50
Venus 03:54 10:58 18:01
Moon 18:17 23:54 05:39
Mars 16:01 20:18 00:35
Jupiter 18:35 23:53 05:11
Saturn 01:38 09:03 16:28
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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01 Oct 2034  –  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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