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 2°42' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 17:37 (EST), 8° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 10 minutes after the Sun at 18:30.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -8.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, 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 23h07m00s 4°03'S Aquarius -8.4 32'35"3
Jupiter 23h07m00s 6°45'S Aquarius -2.0 32"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 19 Feb 2034

The sky on 19 February 2034
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
17:20
Twilight ends
18:54
Twilight begins
04:58

1-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

3%

1 day old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:37 10:49 16:01
Venus 07:08 12:40 18:12
Moon 06:49 12:31 18:22
Mars 08:40 15:23 22:05
Jupiter 07:13 12:52 18:30
Saturn 13:14 20:46 04:18
All times shown in EST.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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28 Nov 2034  –  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
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