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 59' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 9 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:49 (EST), 63° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:34, 65° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:51, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.3, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Cancer.

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 09h17m30s 15°50'N Cancer -12.3 32'13"4
Jupiter 09h17m30s 16°49'N Cancer -2.3 39"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 111° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Apr 2027

The sky on 15 April 2027
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
19:31
Twilight ends
21:11
Twilight begins
04:33

9-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

73%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:51 12:03 18:16
Venus 05:09 10:59 16:50
Moon 13:52 20:56 03:48
Mars 13:52 20:57 04:01
Jupiter 13:30 20:34 03:39
Saturn 06:08 12:29 18:50
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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12 Jan 2028  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
12 Mar 2028  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 May 2028  –  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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