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 4°52' to the south 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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:23 (EST) – 3 hours and 44 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 36° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:49.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.5, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h20m40s 0°27'N Leo -10.5 32'20"9
Jupiter 11h20m40s 5°19'N Leo -1.8 31"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Oct 2027

The sky on 26 October 2027
Sunrise
07:07
Sunset
17:45
Twilight ends
19:20
Twilight begins
05:32

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:59 11:37 17:16
Venus 08:53 13:45 18:37
Moon 03:44 09:55 15:53
Mars 10:10 14:46 19:21
Jupiter 03:23 09:46 16:09
Saturn 17:26 23:53 06:20
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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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