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°10' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 12 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:35 (EDT), 19° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:44, 34° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:07, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.7, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h00m30s 8°20'S Aquarius -12.6 32'39"8
Jupiter 22h00m30s 13°31'S Aquarius -2.7 45"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 137° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Oct 2033

The sky on 5 October 2033
Sunrise
06:42
Sunset
18:18
Twilight ends
19:51
Twilight begins
05:09

12-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

90%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:03 14:02 19:02
Venus 04:49 11:11 17:33
Moon 16:34 22:23 04:21
Mars 14:57 19:22 23:47
Jupiter 16:32 21:44 02:57
Saturn 23:45 07:13 14:41
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

25 Aug 2033  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Oct 2033  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
02 Aug 2034  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
01 Oct 2034  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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