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°04' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 19 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 00:28, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:03, 41° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:09, 32° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, 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 15h40m00s 21°26'S Libra -12.5 32'42"1
Jupiter 15h40m00s 18°21'S Libra -2.3 40"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 124° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Mar 2030

The sky on 23 March 2030
Sunrise
07:24
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
20:59
Twilight begins
06:04

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

73%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:00 14:18 20:37
Venus 05:06 10:34 16:02
Moon 23:19 04:38 09:54
Mars 08:09 14:27 20:46
Jupiter 23:45 05:03 10:21
Saturn 09:56 16:38 23:19
All times shown in EDT.

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 Mar 2030  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
13 May 2030  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Jul 2030  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
15 Apr 2031  –  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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