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 4°13' of each other. The Moon will be 8 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 20:12 (PDT), 41° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:01.

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 -12.1; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

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 14h49m40s 10°49'S Libra -12.1 30'28"8
Jupiter 14h44m20s 14°50'S Libra -2.2 38"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 105° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Jul 2018

The sky on 20 July 2018
Sunrise
05:52
Sunset
19:55
Twilight ends
21:32
Twilight begins
04:14

7-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

67%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:54 14:28 21:02
Venus 09:23 15:47 22:10
Moon 13:57 19:43 01:23
Mars 20:41 01:34 06:28
Jupiter 14:14 19:37 01:01
Saturn 18:08 23:09 04:11
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

10 Jul 2018  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
10 Apr 2019  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Jun 2019  –  Jupiter at opposition
11 Aug 2019  –  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

San Diego

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

Color scheme