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 a mere 20.9 arcminutes 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 26 days old.

From Hackensack , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:11 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 42° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:27.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 12h02m50s 0°31'N Virgo -11.0 31'49"4
Jupiter 12h03m30s 0°50'N Virgo -1.8 32"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Apr 2025

The sky on 22 April 2025
Sunrise
06:04
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:24
Twilight begins
04:22


Waning Crescent

25%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 11:15 17:17
Venus 04:27 10:33 16:39
Moon 03:30 08:26 13:31
Mars 11:43 19:08 02:33
Jupiter 08:36 16:05 23:34
Saturn 04:51 10:43 16:35
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

21 Apr 1968  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
20 Jan 1969  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
21 Mar 1969  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 May 1969  –  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.

Share