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 4°58' of each other. The Moon will be 10 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:55 (PDT), 63° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:45, 79° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:10, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

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 05h44m20s 18°18'N Taurus -12.2 29'28"8
Jupiter 05h44m10s 23°16'N Taurus -2.5 41"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 117° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Sep 2025

The sky on 2 September 2025
Sunrise
06:23
Sunset
19:16
Twilight ends
20:42
Twilight begins
04:57


Waxing Gibbous

75%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:35 12:14 18:53
Venus 03:56 10:51 17:45
Moon 16:20 21:01 01:45
Mars 09:19 15:04 20:50
Jupiter 02:13 09:21 16:28
Saturn 20:11 02:07 08:03
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

22 Dec 1977  –  Jupiter at opposition
19 Feb 1978  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
25 Nov 1978  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
24 Jan 1979  –  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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