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 4°03' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:56 (EDT) – 1 hour and 41 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:18.

The Moon will be at mag -8.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Virgo.

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 13h55m10s 14°43'S Virgo -8.9 33'09"7
Jupiter 13h55m10s 10°39'S Virgo -1.7 30"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Oct 2024

The sky on 5 October 2024
Sunrise
06:51
Sunset
18:27
Twilight ends
19:59
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Crescent

11%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:11 12:54 18:37
Venus 09:40 14:42 19:44
Moon 09:38 14:39 19:32
Mars 23:37 07:08 14:38
Jupiter 21:47 05:15 12:43
Saturn 17:22 22:55 04:28
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

31 May 1993  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Feb 1994  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
30 Apr 1994  –  Jupiter at opposition
01 Jul 1994  –  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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