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 1°30' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 26 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:50 (EST) – 2 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:56.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.2, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h15m30s 13°55'N Aries -10.6 31'07"9
Jupiter 02h15m30s 12°25'N Aries -2.2 34"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 14 Jun 2023

The sky on 14 June 2023
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:09

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

11%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:20 11:36 18:51
Venus 08:46 16:05 23:23
Moon 02:54 09:52 17:04
Mars 09:21 16:29 23:38
Jupiter 02:50 09:38 16:26
Saturn 00:34 06:00 11:26
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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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