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 a mere 43.1 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Ashburn , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:44 (EDT) – 1 hour and 9 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:34.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.4 in Aries; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1 in Pisces.

They 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.

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 01h51m20s 11°03'N Aries -9.4 31'28"8
Jupiter 01h52m30s 10°25'N Pisces -2.1 32"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 17 May 2023

The sky on 17 May 2023
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:06
Twilight begins
04:04

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:09 11:47 18:25
Venus 08:39 16:15 23:51
Moon 04:40 11:26 18:24
Mars 10:09 17:30 00:50
Jupiter 04:45 11:22 17:59
Saturn 02:35 08:03 13:31
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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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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Ashburn

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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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