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 6°02' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 22 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:19, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:46, 51° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:52, 48° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.0, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Virgo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 11h48m10s 3°27'S Virgo -12.0 31'58"9
Jupiter 11h48m10s 2°35'N Virgo -2.1 36"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 89° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 20 Dec 2027

The sky on 20 December 2027
Sunrise
07:11
Sunset
16:25
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:31

22-day old moon
Waning Crescent

43%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:44 12:10 16:36
Venus 09:28 14:10 18:51
Moon 23:40 05:46 11:40
Mars 08:42 13:18 17:53
Jupiter 23:34 05:46 11:58
Saturn 12:52 19:15 01:38
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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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
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