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 5°30' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 6 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 become visible at around 19:04 (PST), 26° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 59 minutes after the Sun at 21:47.

The Moon will be at mag -11.1 in the constellation Scorpius, and Jupiter at mag -1.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Libra.

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 16h01m30s 25°34'S Scorpius -11.1 29'52"1
Jupiter 16h01m30s 20°04'S Libra -1.9 33"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 61° from the Sun, which is in Virgo 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

24 Jul 1971  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Apr 1972  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
24 Jun 1972  –  Jupiter at opposition
25 Aug 1972  –  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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