The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

Jupiter and Neptune will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 6'28" to the north of Neptune.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 3° below the horizon at dawn.

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Jupiter will be at mag -2.1, and Neptune at mag 8.0, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Neptune 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
Jupiter 23h38m30s 3°26'S Aquarius -2.1 33"0
Neptune 23h38m30s 3°32'S Aquarius 8.0 2"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Apr 2022

The sky on 12 April 2022
Sunrise
06:06
Sunset
19:22
Twilight ends
21:03
Twilight begins
04:26

11-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

86%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 13:22 20:14
Venus 04:27 09:57 15:27
Moon 14:45 21:58 04:58
Mars 04:10 09:23 14:36
Jupiter 05:09 10:59 16:50
Saturn 03:55 09:03 14:10
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

01 Dec 2021  –  Neptune ends retrograde motion
28 Jun 2022  –  Neptune enters retrograde motion
16 Sep 2022  –  Neptune at opposition
03 Dec 2022  –  Neptune 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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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