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 5°55' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 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 -8.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Pisces.

The pair 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.

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 01h24m10s 13°37'N Pisces -8.4 29'32"5
Jupiter 01h24m10s 7°41'N Pisces -2.1 32"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 16° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Sep 2024

The sky on 28 September 2024
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
18:39
Twilight ends
20:11
Twilight begins
05:12


Waning Crescent

10%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:35 12:37 18:40
Venus 09:23 14:37 19:50
Moon 02:26 09:54 17:11
Mars 23:48 07:19 14:51
Jupiter 22:14 05:42 13:10
Saturn 17:50 23:24 04:58
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

18 Nov 2010  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
30 Aug 2011  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
28 Oct 2011  –  Jupiter at opposition
25 Dec 2011  –  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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