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 a mere 43.4 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 16:59 (PDT), 12° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 30 minutes after the Sun at 18:12.

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 -9.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 17h54m50s 22°34'S Sagittarius -9.2 31'20"9
Jupiter 17h54m30s 23°17'S Sagittarius -1.8 31"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 23° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Nov 2019

The sky on 28 November 2019
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
16:42
Twilight ends
18:09
Twilight begins
05:01

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:51 10:16 15:41
Venus 08:38 13:32 18:26
Moon 08:30 13:39 18:46
Mars 04:05 09:34 15:03
Jupiter 08:14 13:13 18:12
Saturn 09:32 14:34 19:36
All times shown in PST.

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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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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