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 6°06' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 21 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 00:13, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:31, 35° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:44, 32° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2, and Jupiter at mag -2.2, both in the constellation Scorpius.

The pair 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.

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 16h20m30s 26°35'S Scorpius -12.2 30'26"4
Jupiter 16h20m30s 20°29'S Scorpius -2.2 38"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 109° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Dec 2025

The sky on 13 December 2025
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
16:43
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:17


Waning Crescent

26%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:13 10:22 15:31
Venus 06:22 11:20 16:18
Moon 01:08 06:59 12:42
Mars 07:22 12:14 17:07
Jupiter 18:57 02:02 09:08
Saturn 12:13 18:05 23:57
All times shown in PST.

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 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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