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 1°22' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 4 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 18:19 (EST), 39° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:02.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.8 in the constellation Cetus, and Jupiter at mag -2.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Pisces.

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 00h45m50s 2°18'N Cetus -10.8 31'36"8
Jupiter 00h45m50s 3°40'N Pisces -2.2 34"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 48° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Feb 2035

The sky on 12 February 2035
Sunrise
07:26
Sunset
18:02
Twilight ends
19:34
Twilight begins
05:54

4-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

21%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:06 11:02 15:58
Venus 04:59 09:46 14:34
Moon 09:55 16:15 22:43
Mars 03:41 08:21 13:01
Jupiter 09:31 15:47 22:02
Saturn 15:50 23:07 06:24
All times shown in EST.

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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04 Jan 2036  –  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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Columbus

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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