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

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 share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°28' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 8 days old.

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

From Fairfield however, the pair will be visible from soon after it rises, at 15:51, until soon before it sets at 01:12.

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 -12.2, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, 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 16h51m40s -19°37' Ophiuchus -12.2 30'43"1
Jupiter 16h51m40s -22°05' Ophiuchus -2.4 40"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 117° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 09 Aug 2019

The sky on 09 August 2019
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
04:05

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

77%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:24 11:38 18:53
Venus 05:46 12:53 20:00
Moon 15:36 20:35 01:30
Mars 06:33 13:29 20:24
Jupiter 15:51 20:32 01:12
Saturn 18:04 22:44 03:23
All times shown in EDT.

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 Jun 2019  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Jul 2020  –  Jupiter at opposition
19 Aug 2021  –  Jupiter at opposition
26 Sep 2022  –  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.

Share

Follow

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme