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°50' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 25 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 02:07 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 38° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:41.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.1, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, 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 13h22m10s 14°12'S Virgo -11.1 32'21"5
Jupiter 13h22m10s 7°22'S Virgo -1.8 32"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 55° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Dec 2028

The sky on 11 December 2028
Sunrise
07:01
Sunset
16:10
Twilight ends
17:52
Twilight begins
05:19

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

17%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:07 12:27 16:48
Venus 04:58 09:54 14:49
Moon 02:02 07:26 12:40
Mars 23:50 06:07 12:24
Jupiter 02:07 07:43 13:19
Saturn 13:49 20:32 03:14
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

13 May 2028  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
10 Feb 2029  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
11 Apr 2029  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 Jun 2029  –  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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