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°52' 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 Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:32 (EDT), 26° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:03, 26° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 22:49, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, 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 19h38m50s 16°09'S Sagittarius -12.1 32'00"2
Jupiter 19h38m50s 22°02'S Sagittarius -2.4 38"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 94° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Oct 2032

The sky on 12 October 2032
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
18:15
Twilight ends
19:47
Twilight begins
05:26

8-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

59%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:02 14:01 19:00
Venus 09:59 14:50 19:41
Moon 14:14 19:30 00:50
Mars 04:23 10:46 17:09
Jupiter 14:23 19:03 23:44
Saturn 22:28 05:55 13:23
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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23 Oct 2033  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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