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 1°14' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:45 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 41° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:40.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 10h21m20s 9°48'N Leo -10.7 29'27"4
Jupiter 10h22m50s 11°00'N Leo -1.9 32"3

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

The sky on 11 May 2025

The sky on 11 May 2025
Sunrise
05:24
Sunset
19:54
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:29


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:47 11:26 18:06
Venus 03:40 09:51 16:03
Moon 18:18 --:-- 04:28
Mars 10:59 18:17 01:36
Jupiter 07:20 14:55 22:30
Saturn 03:29 09:23 15:18
All times shown in EDT.

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.

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25 Mar 1979  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
26 Dec 1979  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
24 Feb 1980  –  Jupiter at opposition
26 Apr 1980  –  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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