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 46' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 23 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:26 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 56° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Leo.

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 10h38m50s 8°45'N Leo -11.4 29'31"3
Jupiter 10h38m50s 9°32'N Leo -2.0 34"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 72° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Aug 2024

The sky on 16 August 2024
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
19:49
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
04:17


Waxing Gibbous

89%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 13:06 19:35
Venus 07:43 14:13 20:43
Moon 18:09 22:31 02:57
Mars 00:49 08:17 15:46
Jupiter 00:47 08:13 15:40
Saturn 20:50 02:29 08:07
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.

Related news

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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