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°23' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 9° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 19:59 (EDT), 9° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 13 minutes after the Sun at 20:54.

The Moon will be at mag -8.2, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Aries.

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 03h03m30s 18°48'N Aries -8.2 29'23"2
Jupiter 03h03m30s 16°25'N Aries -2.0 32"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 15° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Jul 2024

The sky on 17 July 2024
Sunrise
05:32
Sunset
20:22
Twilight ends
22:22
Twilight begins
03:31


Waxing Gibbous

84%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:44 21:39
Venus 06:31 13:47 21:04
Moon 17:22 21:50 02:13
Mars 01:38 08:51 16:03
Jupiter 02:25 09:49 17:12
Saturn 22:51 04:32 10:13
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

25 Dec 2011  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Oct 2012  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
02 Dec 2012  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Jan 2013  –  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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