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 a mere 18.2 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:48 (EST) – 3 hours and 16 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 30° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:43.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.5 in Pisces; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3 in Cetus.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

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 00h35m30s 2°50'N Pisces -11.5 32'19"5
Jupiter 00h35m50s 2°33'N Cetus -2.3 37"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 70° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jun 2034

The sky on 11 June 2034
Sunrise
05:04
Sunset
20:20
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
02:50

24-day old moon
Waning Crescent

28%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 13:00 20:24
Venus 07:52 15:25 22:58
Moon 01:53 08:10 14:36
Mars 06:36 14:16 21:55
Jupiter 01:48 08:00 14:13
Saturn 07:20 14:49 22:19
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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
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