Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 50.4 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 16 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:51, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:32, 39° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:12, 27° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 22h35m40s 11°05'S Aquarius -12.5 31'06"6
Jupiter 22h34m00s 10°20'S Aquarius -2.8 47"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 151° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
07:24
Sunset
17:09
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:48


Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:12 13:43 18:13
Venus 10:48 15:19 19:50
Moon 00:03 06:55 13:36
Mars 21:31 04:51 12:10
Jupiter 18:04 01:28 08:51
Saturn 13:43 19:16 00:49
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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26 Jun 1950  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
26 Aug 1950  –  Jupiter at opposition
24 Oct 1950  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Aug 1951  –  Jupiter enters 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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