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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°11' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:51 (EST), 29° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 2 minutes after the Sun at 20:36.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2 in the constellation Cetus, and Jupiter at mag -2.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Pisces.

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 00h39m10s 1°49'N Cetus -10.2 32'20"9
Jupiter 00h39m10s 3°00'N Pisces -2.1 33"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 36° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Feb 2023

The sky on 22 February 2023
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
17:34
Twilight ends
19:06
Twilight begins
05:04

2-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

13%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:02 11:00 15:59
Venus 07:50 13:54 19:58
Moon 08:11 14:16 20:33
Mars 11:01 18:42 02:23
Jupiter 08:08 14:22 20:35
Saturn 06:31 11:46 17:02
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.

Related news

23 Nov 2022  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Sep 2023  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
03 Nov 2023  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Dec 2023  –  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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

Color scheme