The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 12' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 20:34 (EDT), 16° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 45 minutes after the Sun at 22:01.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Leo.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 11h35m10s 3°40'N Leo -10.2 30'09"9
Jupiter 11h35m10s 3°53'N Leo -1.7 31"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 39° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Aug 2016

The sky on 5 August 2016
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:01
Twilight begins
04:27

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

14%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:20 14:50 21:21
Venus 07:34 14:20 21:06
Moon 08:57 15:29 21:55
Mars 15:20 20:02 00:44
Jupiter 09:30 15:45 22:01
Saturn 15:49 20:42 01:36
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.

Related news

09 May 2016  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
06 Feb 2017  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
07 Apr 2017  –  Jupiter at opposition
09 Jun 2017  –  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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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