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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°09' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 15 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 between 18:36 and 05:42. They will become accessible at around 18:36, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:09, 53° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:42 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h34m20s 1°44'S Leo -12.8 33'18"7
Jupiter 11h34m20s 4°25'N Leo -2.5 43"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 174° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Mar 2028

The sky on 11 March 2028
Sunrise
06:08
Sunset
17:54
Twilight ends
19:26
Twilight begins
04:36

15-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:21 10:34 15:46
Venus 07:48 14:48 21:49
Moon 17:47 00:03 06:07
Mars 06:19 12:10 18:01
Jupiter 17:51 00:09 06:28
Saturn 07:41 14:11 20:42
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.

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

Color scheme