Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed
The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°01' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.
From Seattle, the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible at around 21:34 (PDT) as the dusk sky fades, 27° above your southern horizon. They will then reach its highest point in the sky at 21:45, 27° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:48, when they sink to 8° above your south-western horizon.
The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, both in the constellation Libra.
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 closest approach will be as follows:
|Object||Right Ascension||Declination||Constellation||Magnitude||Angular Size|
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 131° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.
|The sky on 23 June 2018|
10 days old
All times shown in PDT.
The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE405 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.
|08 May 2018||– Jupiter at opposition|
|10 Jun 2019||– Jupiter at opposition|
|14 Jul 2020||– Jupiter at opposition|
|19 Aug 2021||– Jupiter at opposition|
The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.