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 4°47' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 23 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 be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:47 (EDT) – 3 hours and 26 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:53.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h28m30s 5°43'S Aquarius -11.8 32'13"4
Jupiter 22h28m30s 10°30'S Aquarius -2.4 38"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 84° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 May 2033

The sky on 22 May 2033
Sunrise
05:13
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
03:10

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

39%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:04 13:48 21:32
Venus 03:22 09:42 16:03
Moon 01:33 07:25 13:25
Mars 23:13 03:36 07:58
Jupiter 01:47 07:11 12:35
Saturn 07:30 15:04 22:37
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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25 Aug 2033  –  Jupiter at opposition
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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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