The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°10' of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.
From Ashburn, the pair will become visible at around 19:34 (EST) as the dusk sky fades, 21° above your south-western horizon. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 31 minutes after the Sun at 21:48.
The Moon will be at mag -11.1, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, 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.
At around the same time, the two objects 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 two objects at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 15h11m40s | -12°39' | Libra | -11.1 | 30'57"6 |
| Jupiter | 15h06m30s | -16°39' | Libra | -1.9 | 32"9 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 58° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.
| The sky on 14 September 2018 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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23% 5 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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Source
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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 May 2018, 20:28 EDT | – Jupiter at opposition |
| 10 Jun 2019, 11:17 EDT | – Jupiter at opposition |
| 14 Jul 2020, 03:48 EDT | – Jupiter at opposition |
| 19 Aug 2021, 20:18 EDT | – Jupiter at opposition |
Image credit
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.