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 2°27' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 16 days old.

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

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:41, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:43, 49° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:47, 19° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, 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 13h19m30s 4°15'S Virgo -12.5 30'05"2
Jupiter 13h19m30s 6°42'S Virgo -2.4 42"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 153° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Mar 2017

The sky on 14 March 2017
Sunrise
07:02
Sunset
19:00
Twilight ends
20:23
Twilight begins
05:39

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

92%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:26 13:29 19:31
Venus 07:13 13:48 20:23
Moon 20:19 02:22 08:19
Mars 08:47 15:25 22:03
Jupiter 20:59 02:43 08:28
Saturn 02:11 07:11 12:10
All times shown in PDT.

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

05 Feb 2017  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
07 Apr 2017  –  Jupiter at opposition
09 Jun 2017  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Mar 2018  –  Jupiter enters 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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