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°38' of each other. The Moon will be 19 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 23:00, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:59, 47° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:38, 41° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

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 23h00m00s 9°31'S Aquarius -12.6 32'41"7
Jupiter 22h58m00s 7°57'S Aquarius -2.7 45"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 135° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Oct 2025

The sky on 6 October 2025
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
18:29
Twilight ends
19:52
Twilight begins
05:24


Waning Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:09 13:38 19:08
Venus 05:02 11:18 17:34
Moon 18:15 00:41 07:21
Mars 08:55 14:17 19:38
Jupiter 00:23 07:28 14:33
Saturn 17:47 23:40 05:33
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

02 Jul 1962  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
31 Aug 1962  –  Jupiter at opposition
29 Oct 1962  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 Aug 1963  –  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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