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 21' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 24 days old.

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

From London , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:57 (BST) – 2 hours and 2 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 13° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:33.

The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 23h36m20s 4°05'S Aquarius -11.4 32'28"4
Jupiter 23h36m20s 3°44'S Aquarius -2.3 36"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 66° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
05:45
Sunset
20:09
Twilight ends
22:28
Twilight begins
03:28


Waning Crescent

22%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:16 11:19 17:23
Venus 04:28 10:36 16:43
Moon 04:22 09:10 14:13
Mars 11:05 19:10 03:16
Jupiter 07:55 16:07 00:19
Saturn 04:56 10:44 16:32
All times shown in BST.

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

08 Oct 1997  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
18 Jul 1998  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
16 Sep 1998  –  Jupiter at opposition
13 Nov 1998  –  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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