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 1°13' 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 2 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 17:03 (EDT), 14° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 57 minutes after the Sun at 18:41.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h00m10s 16°27'S Capricornus -9.5 32'55"3
Jupiter 21h01m10s 17°39'S Capricornus -2.0 32"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 24° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2024

The sky on 28 June 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12


Waning Crescent

42%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:30 14:03 21:35
Venus 05:50 13:23 20:56
Moon 00:24 06:28 12:44
Mars 02:13 09:11 16:09
Jupiter 03:25 10:47 18:08
Saturn 00:06 05:48 11:29
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.

Related news

23 Sep 1961  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
02 Jul 1962  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
31 Aug 1962  –  Jupiter at opposition
29 Oct 1962  –  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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