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 1°49' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 15 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 17:27 and 06:19. They will become accessible at around 17:27, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:53, 66° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 06:19 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.6, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair 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.

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 08h44m40s 17°02'N Cancer -12.8 32'45"2
Jupiter 08h44m40s 18°51'N Cancer -2.6 44"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 178° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:27


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:42 11:35 18:28
Venus 08:11 14:13 20:14
Moon 04:22 11:47 18:59
Mars 00:13 07:49 15:26
Jupiter 23:40 07:11 14:42
Saturn 19:37 01:13 06:49
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

28 Jan 1991  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Mar 1991  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
30 Dec 1991  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
28 Feb 1992  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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