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°30' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 27 days old.

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

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:00 (EDT) – 1 hour and 46 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 16° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:31.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2 in the constellation Aquarius, and Jupiter at mag -2.0 in the neighbouring constellation of Capricornus.

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 20h50m20s 13°38'S Aquarius -10.2 33'06"6
Jupiter 20h50m20s 18°09'S Capricornus -2.0 32"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 35° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2025

The sky on 10 May 2025
Sunrise
06:33
Sunset
20:10
Twilight ends
21:40
Twilight begins
05:03


Waxing Gibbous

97%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:42 12:06 18:30
Venus 04:27 10:35 16:42
Moon 17:46 --:-- 05:07
Mars 12:10 19:01 01:52
Jupiter 08:40 15:40 22:41
Saturn 04:12 10:09 16:06
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 Sep 1996  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 Jun 1997  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
09 Aug 1997  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Oct 1997  –  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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