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
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 2°57' of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 20:43 (EDT), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 5 minutes after the Sun at 23:30.

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 13h06m00s 2°31'S Virgo -11.4 30'29"8
Jupiter 13h02m00s 5°19'S Virgo -1.9 33"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 70° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jul 2017

The sky on 28 July 2017
Sunrise
06:04
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:13
Twilight begins
04:16

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

38%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:25 15:00 21:35
Venus 03:10 10:28 17:46
Moon 11:40 17:47 23:47
Mars 06:01 13:14 20:26
Jupiter 11:59 17:44 23:30
Saturn 17:18 22:05 02:52
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 Jun 2017  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Mar 2018  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 May 2018  –  Jupiter at opposition
10 Jul 2018  –  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

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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