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 2°42' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 13 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:54 (EDT), 27° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:26, 49° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:44, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 12h13m40s 2°55'N Virgo -12.5 29'42"4
Jupiter 12h13m40s 0°12'N Virgo -2.4 42"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 154° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 11 May 2024

The sky on 11 May 2024
Sunrise
05:36
Sunset
20:00
Twilight ends
21:53
Twilight begins
03:44


Waxing Crescent

22%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:44 11:10 17:37
Venus 05:24 12:23 19:21
Moon 08:00 16:13 00:22
Mars 03:55 10:05 16:15
Jupiter 05:58 13:09 20:21
Saturn 03:09 08:49 14:28
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

26 Mar 1981  –  Jupiter at opposition
27 May 1981  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Feb 1982  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
25 Apr 1982  –  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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