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 4°23' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:19 (PDT) – 3 hours and 51 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 41° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:54.

The Moon will be at mag -10.6 in the constellation Orion, and Jupiter at mag -2.1 in the neighbouring constellation of Taurus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 05h53m30s 18°37'N Orion -10.6 29'37"0
Jupiter 05h53m30s 23°01'N Taurus -2.1 33"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 49° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Sep 2025

The sky on 6 September 2025
Sunrise
06:26
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:36
Twilight begins
05:00


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:57 12:28 18:59
Venus 04:04 10:54 17:45
Moon 18:50 00:27 06:14
Mars 09:16 14:58 20:41
Jupiter 02:01 09:08 16:15
Saturn 19:54 01:50 07:46
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.

Related news

15 Jan 1977  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Oct 1977  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
22 Dec 1977  –  Jupiter at opposition
19 Feb 1978  –  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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