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 4 days old.

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

From Fairfield however, the pair will be visible from soon after it rises, at 09:45, until soon before it sets at 20:26.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, 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°24' Aquarius -10.7 32'06"0
Jupiter 22h14m30s -11°57' Aquarius -2.1 34"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 05 Jan 2022

The sky on 05 January 2022
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
16:37
Twilight ends
18:17
Twilight begins
05:37

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

18%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:31 13:18 18:06
Venus 07:19 12:17 17:15
Moon 09:52 14:55 20:08
Mars 05:15 09:52 14:28
Jupiter 09:45 15:05 20:26
Saturn 08:53 13:50 18:48
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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03 Nov 2023  –  Jupiter at opposition
07 Dec 2024  –  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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