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 44' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:47 (EDT) – 3 hours and 33 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks around 06:03.

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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 19h48m00s -21°11' Sagittarius -2.2 37"1
134340 Pluto 19h48m00s -21°56' Sagittarius 15.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 09 Apr 2020

The sky on 09 April 2020
Sunrise
06:20
Sunset
19:26
Twilight ends
21:04
Twilight begins
04:43

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

95%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:42 11:33 17:25
Venus 08:06 15:47 23:28
Moon 20:17 02:00 07:34
Mars 03:26 08:17 13:07
Jupiter 02:44 07:28 12:12
Saturn 03:03 07:52 12:41
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
18 Jul 2021  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
20 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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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