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 43' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 6 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:06 (EST), 50° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:49.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Cetus.

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

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 00h28m20s 1°00'N Cetus -11.6 31'27"6
Jupiter 00h28m20s 1°43'N Cetus -2.3 37"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 71° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jan 2035

The sky on 15 January 2035
Sunrise
07:13
Sunset
16:47
Twilight ends
18:25
Twilight begins
05:35


Waxing Crescent

39%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:08 13:10 18:13
Venus 03:48 08:43 13:37
Moon 10:38 16:47 23:04
Mars 03:26 08:14 13:03
Jupiter 10:31 16:40 22:49
Saturn 17:14 00:32 07:50
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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