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 5°18' of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:16 (EDT) – 3 hours and 12 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 23° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:11.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.2. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 19h58m20s 15°24'S Sagittarius -11.7 32'21"2
Jupiter 20h03m10s 20°35'S Sagittarius -2.2 36"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2032

The sky on 4 April 2032
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:20
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:52

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

32%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 11:22 17:08
Venus 06:02 11:59 17:57
Moon 02:45 07:59 13:18
Mars 07:37 14:37 21:38
Jupiter 03:16 08:02 12:49
Saturn 09:40 17:05 00:29
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.

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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
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