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 3°13' of each other. The Moon will be 20 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 01:03, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:24, 37° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:37, 36° above your southern horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h57m00s 25°49'S Sagittarius -12.2 30'31"2
Jupiter 18h56m40s 22°36'S Sagittarius -2.3 39"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 108° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 25 May 2024

The sky on 25 May 2024
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
20:19
Twilight ends
21:53
Twilight begins
04:50


Waning Gibbous

93%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:25 12:00 18:36
Venus 06:18 13:11 20:03
Moon 21:50 02:49 07:47
Mars 04:05 10:23 16:40
Jupiter 06:11 13:01 19:52
Saturn 02:43 08:31 14:18
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.

Related news

29 Jul 1983  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
29 Apr 1984  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
29 Jun 1984  –  Jupiter at opposition
29 Aug 1984  –  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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