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 32' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 1 days old.

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

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 19:16 (PDT), 10° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 7 minutes after the Sun at 20:08.

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 -8.3, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 01h02m50s 4°59'N Pisces -8.3 32'15"6
Jupiter 01h02m50s 5°31'N Pisces -2.0 32"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Mar 2023

The sky on 22 March 2023
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
19:01
Twilight ends
20:23
Twilight begins
05:25

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:06 13:14 19:22
Venus 08:24 15:04 21:45
Moon 07:31 13:52 20:23
Mars 11:25 18:40 01:55
Jupiter 07:34 13:51 20:08
Saturn 05:33 11:04 16:35
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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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.

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San Diego

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32.72°N
117.16°W
PDT

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