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°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 San Diego , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:56 (PDT), 34° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:27, 35° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:42, when they sink below 7° above your south-western 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 -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'S Ophiuchus -12.2 30'43"1
Jupiter 16h51m40s 22°05'S 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 9 Aug 2019

The sky on 9 August 2019
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:33

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

77%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:39 11:34 18:29
Venus 06:00 12:49 19:38
Moon 15:19 20:37 01:52
Mars 06:43 13:24 20:05
Jupiter 15:24 20:27 01:29
Saturn 17:37 22:39 03:41
All times shown in PDT.

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
11 Aug 2019  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
14 May 2020  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
14 Jul 2020  –  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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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