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°17' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:04 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 24° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.0. 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 17h24m10s 20°15'S Ophiuchus -11.6 30'11"1
Jupiter 17h22m50s 22°32'S Ophiuchus -2.0 35"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Feb 2019

The sky on 27 February 2019
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
17:31
Twilight ends
19:04
Twilight begins
04:48

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

33%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:56 13:00 19:03
Venus 04:26 09:12 13:59
Moon 01:44 06:33 11:17
Mars 08:39 15:39 22:39
Jupiter 02:04 06:39 11:13
Saturn 03:53 08:31 13:08
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

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.

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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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