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

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 share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 3°49' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 14 days old.

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

From Seattle , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:53, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:44, 26° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:31, 8° above your south-western horizon.

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 -12.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Libra.

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 15h08m10s 12°27'S Libra -12.6 30'28"2
Jupiter 15h08m10s 16°16'S Libra -2.5 43"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 170° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Apr 2018

The sky on 30 April 2018
Sunrise
05:51
Sunset
20:20
Twilight ends
22:27
Twilight begins
03:45

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

98%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 11:27 17:42
Venus 07:03 14:54 22:45
Moon 20:00 01:26 06:42
Mars 02:01 06:16 10:30
Jupiter 20:55 01:44 06:33
Saturn 00:56 05:13 09:31
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

08 Mar 2018  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 May 2018  –  Jupiter at opposition
10 Jul 2018  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
10 Apr 2019  –  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.

Share

Seattle

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

47.61°N
122.33°W
PDT

Color scheme