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 4°21' of each other. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:30, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:00, 59° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:22, 21° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

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 00h38m20s 7°05'N Pisces -12.6 31'24"5
Jupiter 00h46m20s 3°13'N Pisces -2.9 48"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 162° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Sep 2025

The sky on 12 September 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
19:02
Twilight ends
20:27
Twilight begins
05:05


Waning Gibbous

64%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:28 12:47 19:05
Venus 04:15 11:00 17:44
Moon 21:29 04:44 12:09
Mars 09:11 14:49 20:28
Jupiter 01:42 08:49 15:55
Saturn 19:30 01:25 07:20
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

03 Aug 1951  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
02 Oct 1951  –  Jupiter at opposition
29 Nov 1951  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 Sep 1952  –  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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