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

Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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

The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 2°56' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Fairfield however, the trio will be visible from soon after it rises, at 09:26, until soon before it sets at 19:00. Always take extreme caution when trying to make daytime observations of the Moon while the Sun is above the horizon.

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

The Moon will be at mag -10.1 in Capricornus; Jupiter will be at mag -2.0 in Sagittarius; and Saturn will be at mag 0.5 in Capricornus.

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 trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 20h09m40s -23°34' Capricornus -10.1 31'46"0
Jupiter 20h05m50s -20°46' Sagittarius -2.0 32"7
Saturn 20h07m50s -20°34' Capricornus 0.5 15"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Dec 2020

The sky on 17 December 2020
Sunrise
07:10
Sunset
16:25
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:31

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

11%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:12 11:42 16:11
Venus 05:16 10:07 14:59
Moon 10:03 14:48 19:37
Mars 12:48 19:23 01:57
Jupiter 09:25 14:11 18:57
Saturn 09:26 14:13 19:00
All times shown in EST.

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

20 Jul 2020  –  Saturn at opposition
02 Aug 2021  –  Saturn at opposition
14 Aug 2022  –  Saturn at opposition
27 Aug 2023  –  Saturn 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

Follow

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme