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

Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 2°17' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:22 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 42° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:54.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h18m00s 4°25'S Virgo -11.4 29'40"4
Jupiter 13h15m00s 6°35'S Virgo -1.9 33"8

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 22 Dec 2016

The sky on 22 December 2016
Sunrise
07:13
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:07
Twilight begins
05:33

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

29%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:06 12:46 17:26
Venus 10:07 15:06 20:04
Moon 00:50 06:52 12:48
Mars 10:42 16:04 21:25
Jupiter 01:22 07:02 12:42
Saturn 06:21 11:03 15:45
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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme