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 3°44' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 12 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:49 (EDT), 19° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:34, 57° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:23, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.8, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h40m20s 5°07'N Pisces -12.7 32'40"7
Jupiter 01h40m20s 8°51'N Pisces -2.8 47"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 146° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Jun 2024

The sky on 29 June 2024
Sunrise
05:20
Sunset
20:29
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
03:12


Waning Crescent

36%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:36 14:07 21:38
Venus 05:52 13:24 20:57
Moon 00:47 07:15 13:57
Mars 02:11 09:10 16:09
Jupiter 03:22 10:44 18:05
Saturn 00:02 05:44 11:25
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

23 Oct 1999  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Dec 1999  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
29 Sep 2000  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
27 Nov 2000  –  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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