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 3°17' 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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:06, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:05, 29° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:08, 27° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Libra.

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

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 15h38m50s 21°38'S Libra -12.1 32'17"4
Jupiter 15h38m50s 18°21'S Libra -2.1 37"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 97° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Feb 2030

The sky on 24 February 2030
Sunrise
06:25
Sunset
17:26
Twilight ends
19:00
Twilight begins
04:51

22-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

51%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:12 11:18 16:23
Venus 03:58 08:55 13:52
Moon 00:19 05:02 09:40
Mars 07:19 13:16 19:13
Jupiter 00:13 05:06 09:58
Saturn 09:31 16:33 23:35
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 Jun 2029  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Mar 2030  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
13 May 2030  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Jul 2030  –  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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