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°26' of each other. The Moon will be 6 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will become visible at around 17:46 (EDT), 41° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:50.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3. 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 20h58m20s 22°38'S Capricornus -11.6 31'23"1
Jupiter 20h53m00s 18°22'S Capricornus -2.3 36"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 74° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Jun 2024

The sky on 26 June 2024
Sunrise
06:24
Sunset
20:32
Twilight ends
22:09
Twilight begins
04:46


Waning Gibbous

72%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:24 14:28 21:31
Venus 06:51 13:54 20:56
Moon 23:50 05:25 11:07
Mars 03:09 09:47 16:25
Jupiter 04:32 11:26 18:20
Saturn 00:41 06:29 12:17
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

03 Oct 1985  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
12 Jul 1986  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Sep 1986  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Nov 1986  –  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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