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 and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°13' of each other. The Moon will be 5 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 17:05 (EDT), 37° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:07.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.5 in Aquarius; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3 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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 22h01m20s 17°42'S Aquarius -11.5 31'44"1
Jupiter 21h55m30s 13°43'S Capricornus -2.3 36"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 69° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 9 Dec 2021

The sky on 9 December 2021
Sunrise
07:15
Sunset
16:46
Twilight ends
18:22
Twilight begins
05:39

5-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

37%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:51 12:25 17:00
Venus 09:59 14:41 19:23
Moon 12:08 17:25 22:50
Mars 05:38 10:34 15:31
Jupiter 11:32 16:50 22:07
Saturn 10:43 15:42 20:42
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.

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23 Nov 2022  –  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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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