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 3°12' of each other. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:27 (EST) – 1 hour and 39 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:45.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.1 in Cetus; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1 in Aries.

They 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.

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 02h25m40s 9°56'N Cetus -10.1 32'45"1
Jupiter 02h22m00s 13°01'N Aries -2.1 33"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jun 2035

The sky on 3 June 2035
Sunrise
05:06
Sunset
20:15
Twilight ends
22:25
Twilight begins
02:56

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:41 11:47 18:53
Venus 04:14 11:25 18:36
Moon 03:38 10:19 17:09
Mars 01:03 06:16 11:29
Jupiter 03:27 10:19 17:11
Saturn 08:48 16:11 23:33
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
EST

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