The Moon, Jupiter, 134340 Pluto and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 6°30' of each other. The Moon will be 21 days old.
From Fairfield , the quartet will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:16 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 45° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:02.
The Moon will be at mag -11.9; Jupiter will be at mag -2.5; 134340 Pluto will be at mag 0.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. The quartet will lie in the constellation Pisces.
They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.
At around the same time, the quartet will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.
A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.
The positions of the quartet at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:
| Object | Right Ascension | Declination | Constellation | Magnitude | Angular Size |
| The Moon | 00h00m50s | 5°47'N | Pisces | -11.9 | 29'43"6 |
| Jupiter | 00h11m40s | 0°08'S | Pisces | -2.5 | 40"9 |
| 134340 Pluto | 00h00m00s | 0°00'N | Pisces | 0.0 | 0"0 |
| Uranus | 00h01m40s | 0°37'S | Pisces | 5.9 | 3"4 |
The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The quartet will be at an angular separation of 99° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.
The sky on 17 Jul 2024
| The sky on 17 July 2024 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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85% 12 days old |
All times shown in EDT.
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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
| 13 Oct 2009 | – Jupiter ends retrograde motion |
| 23 Jul 2010 | – Jupiter enters retrograde motion |
| 21 Sep 2010 | – Jupiter at opposition |
| 18 Nov 2010 | – 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.