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 2°11' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 17 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Washington , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:11, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:17, 31° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:52, 27° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.6, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair 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.

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 19h52m00s 23°21'S Sagittarius -12.5 31'11"9
Jupiter 19h52m00s 21°10'S Sagittarius -2.6 44"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 142° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jun 2020

The sky on 8 June 2020
Sunrise
06:11
Sunset
20:52
Twilight ends
22:44
Twilight begins
04:19

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

86%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 15:11 22:33
Venus 05:46 12:58 20:10
Moon 23:06 03:58 08:53
Mars 02:01 07:42 13:23
Jupiter 23:22 04:17 09:12
Saturn 23:39 04:38 09:36
All times shown in MDT.

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 May 2020  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
14 Jul 2020  –  Jupiter at opposition
12 Sep 2020  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
20 Jun 2021  –  Jupiter enters 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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Washington

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37.13°N
113.51°W
MDT

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