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 43' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 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 be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 16:44 (EST), 9° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 28 minutes after the Sun at 17:53.

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 at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair 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.

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 17h54m30s 22°33'S Sagittarius -9.2 31'21"0
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
06:53
Sunset
16:25
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:15

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:09 10:20 15:32
Venus 09:08 13:37 18:05
Moon 08:57 13:36 18:13
Mars 04:22 09:39 14:56
Jupiter 08:43 13:18 17:53
Saturn 09:59 14:39 19:19
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

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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Longitude:
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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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