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 5°37' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:45 (EDT) – 1 hour and 34 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:58.

The Moon will be at mag -9.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Aries.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 03h20m00s 23°04'N Aries -9.6 31'17"8
Jupiter 03h20m00s 17°26'N Aries -2.1 32"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 28° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Oct 2024

The sky on 10 October 2024
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
18:19
Twilight ends
19:51
Twilight begins
05:25


Waxing Gibbous

58%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:34 13:05 18:35
Venus 09:52 14:47 19:41
Moon 14:40 19:02 23:28
Mars 23:29 06:59 14:28
Jupiter 21:28 04:56 12:24
Saturn 17:01 22:34 04:07
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

15 Dec 1987  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Sep 1988  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
22 Nov 1988  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Jan 1989  –  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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