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 5°06' to the north 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 Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:26 (EST) – 2 hours and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 18° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:36.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h45m00s 16°14'S Sagittarius -11.0 32'47"0
Jupiter 19h45m00s 21°21'S Sagittarius -2.0 33"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 7 Mar 2032

The sky on 7 March 2032
Sunrise
06:53
Sunset
18:29
Twilight ends
19:59
Twilight begins
05:23

25-day old moon
Waning Crescent

14%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:15 13:30 19:45
Venus 06:04 11:18 16:33
Moon 03:47 08:51 13:59
Mars 08:17 14:49 21:20
Jupiter 04:26 09:13 14:00
Saturn 11:06 18:26 01:46
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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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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Columbus

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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