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 6°06' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:42 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 33° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:39.

The Moon will be at mag -11.2 in Scorpius; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9 in Libra.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 15h54m00s 25°37'S Scorpius -11.2 30'57"8
Jupiter 15h59m10s 19°37'S Libra -1.9 33"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 60° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Sep 2025

The sky on 13 September 2025
Sunrise
06:31
Sunset
19:00
Twilight ends
20:25
Twilight begins
05:06


Waning Gibbous

54%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:33 12:50 19:06
Venus 04:17 11:01 17:44
Moon 22:14 05:44 13:20
Mars 09:10 14:48 20:26
Jupiter 01:39 08:45 15:52
Saturn 19:25 01:21 07:16
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.

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23 Jun 1970  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
23 Mar 1971  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
23 May 1971  –  Jupiter at opposition
24 Jul 1971  –  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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