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 4°37' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 21 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:43 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 34° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:43.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h14m30s 16°27'S Aquarius -12.1 31'00"7
Jupiter 22h14m30s 11°49'S Aquarius -2.5 40"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 101° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jun 2021

The sky on 1 June 2021
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
20:54
Twilight ends
22:53
Twilight begins
04:03

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

54%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 14:24 21:50
Venus 07:11 14:44 22:16
Moon 02:04 07:10 12:22
Mars 09:07 16:32 23:58
Jupiter 01:43 07:06 12:28
Saturn 00:52 05:54 10:56
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

12 Sep 2020  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
20 Jun 2021  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 2021  –  Jupiter at opposition
18 Oct 2021  –  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.

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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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