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 3°04' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will be visible from soon after it rises, at 05:01, until soon before it sets at 14:26. Always take extreme caution when trying to make daytime observations of the Moon while the Sun is above the 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 -9.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 16h44m50s -18°35' Ophiuchus -9.7 30'11"5
Jupiter 16h42m20s -21°36' Ophiuchus -1.8 31"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 03 Jan 2019

The sky on 03 January 2019
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
16:36
Twilight ends
18:15
Twilight begins
05:37

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

4%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:16 10:50 15:24
Venus 03:33 08:39 13:44
Moon 04:57 09:59 14:56
Mars 11:01 17:05 23:10
Jupiter 05:01 09:43 14:26
Saturn 07:11 11:50 16:29
All times shown in EST.

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 May 2018  –  Jupiter at opposition
10 Jun 2019  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Jul 2020  –  Jupiter at opposition
19 Aug 2021  –  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.

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