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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

Jupiter and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 41' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:42, when they reach an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:14, 25° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 03:38, 22° above your southern horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.7, and 134340 Pluto at mag 14.9, 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 19h45m10s 21°31'S Sagittarius -2.7 45"9
134340 Pluto 19h45m10s 22°12'S Sagittarius 14.9 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 159° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jun 2020

The sky on 25 June 2020
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:40
Twilight begins
02:51

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

25%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:01 13:20 20:39
Venus 03:32 10:42 17:53
Moon 09:29 16:48 23:56
Mars 00:36 06:26 12:17
Jupiter 21:35 02:14 06:53
Saturn 21:53 02:38 07:22
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.

Share

Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

Color scheme