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 3°57' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 14 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 between 20:22 and 05:11. They will become accessible at around 20:22, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:47, 35° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:11 when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h57m00s 17°42'S Capricornus -12.7 31'35"2
Jupiter 21h57m00s 13°44'S Capricornus -2.9 48"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 173° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Aug 2021

The sky on 22 August 2021
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:25

14-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 14:05 20:26
Venus 09:21 15:15 21:09
Moon 19:44 00:46 05:56
Mars 07:25 13:53 20:20
Jupiter 19:33 00:47 06:00
Saturn 18:37 23:30 04:24
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

19 Aug 2021  –  Jupiter at opposition
18 Oct 2021  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Jul 2022  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
26 Sep 2022  –  Jupiter 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.

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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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