The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 2°14' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.
From Ashburn, the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:53 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 30° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks around 05:40.
The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.
They 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.
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 | 19h57m10s | -23°08' | Sagittarius | -12.2 | 30'55"0 |
| Jupiter | 19h56m00s | -20°55' | Sagittarius | -2.5 | 41"2 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 115° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.
| The sky on 12 May 2020 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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71% 19 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 27 Dec 2019 | – Jupiter at solar conjunction |
| 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.