Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 2°28' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 25 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:16 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 42° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:35.

The Moon will be at mag -11.2, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h41m50s 11°45'S Virgo -11.2 32'07"2
Jupiter 13h41m50s 9°17'S Virgo -1.8 32"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 57° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Aug 2025

The sky on 13 August 2025
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:12
Twilight begins
04:37


Waning Gibbous

70%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:56 11:46 18:36
Venus 03:24 10:29 17:35
Moon 21:47 04:11 10:46
Mars 09:37 15:36 21:36
Jupiter 03:14 10:23 17:32
Saturn 21:32 03:30 09:27
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

18 May 1957  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
15 Feb 1958  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
16 Apr 1958  –  Jupiter at opposition
18 Jun 1958  –  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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