The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 45' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Columbus however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 20° above the horizon at dawn.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.2, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.1, 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 through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and 134340 Pluto 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
Jupiter 19h46m50s 21°14'S Sagittarius -2.2 36"8
134340 Pluto 19h46m50s 21°59'S Sagittarius 15.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 82° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Apr 2020

The sky on 6 April 2020
Sunrise
07:05
Sunset
20:01
Twilight ends
21:36
Twilight begins
05:31

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

98%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:22 12:07 17:53
Venus 08:53 16:27 00:00
Moon 18:29 00:51 07:05
Mars 04:07 08:59 13:50
Jupiter 03:30 08:17 13:05
Saturn 03:50 08:42 13:34
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

14 Jul 2019  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
15 Jul 2020  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
17 Jul 2021  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
19 Jul 2022  –  134340 Pluto 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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