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°27' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 18 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:10, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:42, 37° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 04:59, 36° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.7, 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 22h16m30s 16°13'S Aquarius -12.4 31'22"4
Jupiter 22h16m30s 11°46'S Aquarius -2.7 43"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 126° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2021

The sky on 28 June 2021
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

75%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:18 11:30 18:43
Venus 07:17 14:41 22:04
Moon 23:25 04:19 09:21
Mars 08:04 15:16 22:29
Jupiter 23:21 04:42 10:04
Saturn 22:28 03:26 08:24
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

20 Jun 2021  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 2021  –  Jupiter at opposition
18 Oct 2021  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Jul 2022  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
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