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 1°56' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 26 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:51 (EST) – 3 hours and 58 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:31.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair 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.

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 12h59m00s 3°06'S Virgo -10.6 29'35"9
Jupiter 12h59m00s 5°02'S Virgo -1.8 31"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2016

The sky on 24 November 2016
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:12

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

13%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:16 12:43 17:10
Venus 10:13 14:40 19:08
Moon 02:06 08:12 14:11
Mars 11:38 16:32 21:26
Jupiter 02:50 08:36 14:21
Saturn 07:56 12:39 17:22
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.

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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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