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 2°00' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 8 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 become visible at around 19:46 (EST), 24° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:09.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.2, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

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 17h11m40s 20°41'S Ophiuchus -12.2 32'18"1
Jupiter 17h11m40s 22°42'S Ophiuchus -2.3 39"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 105° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Aug 2031

The sky on 26 August 2031
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:28
Twilight ends
21:10
Twilight begins
04:16

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

68%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:34 11:34 18:35
Venus 04:27 11:08 17:49
Moon 14:51 19:36 00:20
Mars 13:39 18:15 22:51
Jupiter 15:02 19:36 00:09
Saturn 00:19 07:48 15:16
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

16 Aug 2031  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
19 May 2032  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
19 Jul 2032  –  Jupiter at opposition
17 Sep 2032  –  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
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