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 1°56' of each other. The Moon will be 16 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 19:45, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 02:05, 66° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:59, 23° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 08h55m20s 16°04'N Cancer -12.7 32'40"0
Jupiter 08h58m10s 17°52'N Cancer -2.5 43"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 150° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Jul 2024

The sky on 27 July 2024
Sunrise
05:41
Sunset
20:14
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
03:46


Waning Crescent

49%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:02 14:38 21:13
Venus 06:55 13:58 21:01
Moon 23:15 06:02 13:02
Mars 01:21 08:40 15:59
Jupiter 01:53 09:18 16:42
Saturn 22:11 03:51 09:32
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 Nov 1990  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
28 Jan 1991  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Mar 1991  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
30 Dec 1991  –  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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