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°50' of each other. The Moon will be 13 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:58 (EDT), 9° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:11, 50° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 05:28, when they sink below 7° 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 00h12m30s 2°23'S Pisces -12.7 31'47"2
Jupiter 00h09m10s 0°45'S Pisces -2.9 48"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 166° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Oct 2022

The sky on 8 October 2022
Sunrise
07:10
Sunset
18:41
Twilight ends
20:10
Twilight begins
05:41

13-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:41 11:52 18:03
Venus 06:52 12:44 18:36
Moon 18:22 00:27 06:45
Mars 22:04 05:27 12:50
Jupiter 18:11 00:12 06:12
Saturn 16:17 21:24 02:31
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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03 Nov 2023  –  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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Ashburn

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Longitude:
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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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