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 45' 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 Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:33 (EST), 14° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:16, 65° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:38, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 03h28m40s 17°01'N Taurus -12.5 29'27"9
Jupiter 03h28m40s 17°46'N Taurus -2.8 47"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 160° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:33 12:55 17:17
Venus 10:09 14:32 18:54
Moon 23:09 06:06 12:50
Mars 20:36 04:03 11:30
Jupiter 17:09 00:40 08:11
Saturn 12:58 18:29 23:59
All times shown in EST.

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

18 Nov 1976  –  Jupiter at opposition
15 Jan 1977  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Oct 1977  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
22 Dec 1977  –  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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