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 51' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 11 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:36 (EST), 61° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:40, 83° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 02:58, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 06h24m40s 24°17'N Gemini -12.4 31'48"6
Jupiter 06h24m40s 23°26'N Gemini -2.5 41"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 121° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2024

The sky on 24 November 2024
Sunrise
06:57
Sunset
17:26
Twilight ends
18:50
Twilight begins
05:33


Waning Crescent

28%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:35 13:35 18:34
Venus 10:16 15:15 20:15
Moon 01:06 07:30 13:46
Mars 21:46 04:42 11:37
Jupiter 18:20 01:18 08:16
Saturn 13:25 19:07 00:49
All times shown in EST.

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

01 Jan 2002  –  Jupiter at opposition
01 Mar 2002  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Dec 2002  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
02 Feb 2003  –  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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