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°19' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From Fairfield however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -7.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.8, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 18h19m00s 27°31'S Sagittarius -7.9 30'01"1
Jupiter 18h19m00s 23°12'S Sagittarius -1.8 31"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Jul 2024

The sky on 8 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:27
Twilight ends
22:32
Twilight begins
03:20


Waxing Crescent

10%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:20 14:33 21:47
Venus 06:10 13:37 21:03
Moon 07:51 15:19 22:35
Mars 01:54 09:00 16:06
Jupiter 02:54 10:16 17:39
Saturn 23:27 05:08 10:49
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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

06 Aug 2007  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 May 2008  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
09 Jul 2008  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Sep 2008  –  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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