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

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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°19' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 23 days old.

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

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:20 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 27° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:27.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 17h22m50s 20°13'S Ophiuchus -11.6 30'11"7
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 77° 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
06:44
Sunset
17:59
Twilight ends
19:28
Twilight begins
05:15

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

34%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 13:25 19:28
Venus 04:42 09:38 14:33
Moon 01:56 06:59 11:59
Mars 09:11 16:04 22:57
Jupiter 02:20 07:04 11:49
Saturn 04:09 08:56 13:43
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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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