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 2°49' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 7 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 become visible at around 18:03 (EDT), 66° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 00:34.

The Moon will be at mag -11.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h05m20s 17°25'N Taurus -11.8 31'21"8
Jupiter 04h05m20s 20°15'N Taurus -2.3 37"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 80° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Sep 2024

The sky on 29 September 2024
Sunrise
06:45
Sunset
18:37
Twilight ends
20:09
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:40 12:40 18:40
Venus 09:25 14:37 19:49
Moon 03:31 10:38 17:33
Mars 23:46 07:18 14:49
Jupiter 22:10 05:38 13:06
Saturn 17:46 23:20 04:54
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

25 Jan 2001  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
02 Nov 2001  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
01 Jan 2002  –  Jupiter at opposition
01 Mar 2002  –  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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