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 2°13' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 23 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 01:17 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 41° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:07.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.3, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, 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 02h34m40s 16°10'N Aries -11.3 31'01"3
Jupiter 02h34m40s 13°56'N Aries -2.3 36"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 67° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jul 2023

The sky on 11 July 2023
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:30
Twilight begins
03:23

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

26%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:23 13:48 21:13
Venus 08:41 15:26 22:11
Moon 00:53 07:51 15:01
Mars 08:59 15:46 22:33
Jupiter 01:17 08:11 15:04
Saturn 22:47 04:12 09:37
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
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
EDT

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