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 1°36' of each other. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:26, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:45, 48° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:00, 19° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h25m00s 0°46'S Pisces -12.7 31'53"9
Jupiter 00h22m10s 0°39'N Pisces -2.9 48"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 162° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Sep 2022

The sky on 11 September 2022
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:01
Twilight ends
20:38
Twilight begins
04:40

15-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

95%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:09 13:46 19:23
Venus 05:21 12:01 18:41
Moon 19:33 01:24 07:28
Mars 22:38 06:04 13:29
Jupiter 19:40 01:45 07:51
Saturn 17:48 22:49 03:51
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.

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04 Sep 2023  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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