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 4°09' of each other. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible between 20:51 and 05:46. They will become accessible at around 20:51, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 01:18, 38° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:46 when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h06m30s 21°48'S Capricornus -12.6 31'10"9
Jupiter 21h01m30s 17°49'S Capricornus -2.8 47"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 173° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Jun 2024

The sky on 29 June 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:08
Twilight ends
21:52
Twilight begins
03:57


Waning Crescent

38%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 14:07 21:17
Venus 06:13 13:25 20:36
Moon 00:54 07:21 13:59
Mars 02:24 09:10 15:55
Jupiter 03:40 10:43 17:46
Saturn 23:57 05:43 11:29
All times shown in PDT.

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

04 Jun 1985  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
04 Aug 1985  –  Jupiter at opposition
03 Oct 1985  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
12 Jul 1986  –  Jupiter enters 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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