The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 6°23' of each other. The Moon will be 18 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:02, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:47, 40° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:04, 22° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 13h30m40s 14°45'S Virgo -12.6 32'58"7
Jupiter 13h39m40s 8°45'S Virgo -2.3 41"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 136° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Mar 2029

The sky on 3 March 2029
Sunrise
06:21
Sunset
17:45
Twilight ends
19:17
Twilight begins
04:50

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

82%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:48 10:56 16:05
Venus 06:18 11:46 17:14
Moon 20:42 02:10 07:28
Mars 19:57 01:55 07:53
Jupiter 21:15 02:47 08:19
Saturn 08:41 15:26 22:11
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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10 Feb 2029  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
11 Apr 2029  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 Jun 2029  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Mar 2030  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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