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°36' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 10 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:34 (EST), 37° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:53, 59° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:53, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.7, 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 02h14m00s 14°45'N Aries -12.5 31'37"5
Jupiter 02h14m00s 12°08'N Aries -2.7 44"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 126° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Dec 2023

The sky on 22 December 2023
Sunrise
07:08
Sunset
16:14
Twilight ends
17:56
Twilight begins
05:26

10-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

83%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:02 11:42 16:22
Venus 03:54 08:57 14:00
Moon 13:08 20:16 03:37
Mars 06:27 10:57 15:27
Jupiter 13:04 19:53 02:41
Saturn 10:41 15:58 21:16
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.

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03 Nov 2023  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Dec 2023  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 Oct 2024  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
07 Dec 2024  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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