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 1°52' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 5 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 18:49 (EDT), 22° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 19 minutes after the Sun at 21:51.

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 -11.4, 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 17h09m10s 20°47'S Ophiuchus -11.4 31'14"7
Jupiter 17h09m10s 22°40'S Ophiuchus -2.0 34"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 68° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Oct 2019

The sky on 3 October 2019
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
18:32
Twilight ends
20:04
Twilight begins
05:17

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

36%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:37 13:54 19:12
Venus 07:58 13:32 19:06
Moon 12:19 17:14 22:05
Mars 05:57 12:04 18:11
Jupiter 12:35 17:13 21:50
Saturn 14:25 19:03 23:42
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

11 Aug 2019  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
14 May 2020  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
14 Jul 2020  –  Jupiter at opposition
12 Sep 2020  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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