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 1°03' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 14 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:52 (EDT), 11° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 00:35, 49° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 05:32, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.9, both in the constellation Aquarius.

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 22h35m30s 11°26'S Aquarius -12.8 33'13"5
Jupiter 22h35m30s 10°22'S Aquarius -2.9 48"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 165° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Sep 2024

The sky on 29 September 2024
Sunrise
07:16
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:56


Waning Crescent

8%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:13 13:13 19:14
Venus 09:42 15:11 20:39
Moon 04:24 11:12 17:52
Mars 00:50 07:51 14:52
Jupiter 23:13 06:12 13:11
Saturn 18:10 23:53 05:37
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

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

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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