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°20' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 18 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:14, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:45, 62° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:52, 25° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, 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 11h45m50s 3°14'S Virgo -12.7 33'02"2
Jupiter 11h45m50s 3°05'N Virgo -2.4 42"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 145° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Feb 2028

The sky on 12 February 2028
Sunrise
07:07
Sunset
18:11
Twilight ends
19:32
Twilight begins
05:46

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

87%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:56 11:19 16:41
Venus 09:10 15:18 21:26
Moon 19:45 02:02 08:12
Mars 07:37 13:11 18:45
Jupiter 20:35 02:45 08:55
Saturn 10:06 16:24 22:43
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.

Related news

12 Jan 2028  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
12 Mar 2028  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 May 2028  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
10 Feb 2029  –  Jupiter enters 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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Jacksonville

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30.33°N
81.66°W
EST

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