Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 3°20' of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Columbus , the trio will become visible at around 21:25 (EDT), 35° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 39 minutes after the Sun at 00:44.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5; Jupiter will be at mag -2.0; and Saturn will be at mag 0.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 trio 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 trio at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 12h18m10s 3°02'N Virgo -11.5 30'08"3
Jupiter 12h13m20s 0°04'S Virgo -2.0 34"4
Saturn 12h16m00s 0°58'N Virgo 0.7 17"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 5 May 2024

The sky on 5 May 2024
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
20:30
Twilight ends
22:16
Twilight begins
04:38


Waning Crescent

4%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:32 11:52 18:12
Venus 06:09 12:56 19:44
Moon 04:56 11:16 17:50
Mars 04:47 10:51 16:54
Jupiter 06:58 14:06 21:13
Saturn 04:10 09:50 15:29
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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27 Jun 1982  –  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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