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 3°32' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 29 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 5° above the horizon at dawn.

The Moon will be at mag -7.8 in the constellation Orion, and Jupiter at mag -1.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

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 06h10m00s 19°40'N Orion -7.8 29'22"9
Jupiter 06h10m00s 23°12'N Gemini -1.9 31"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2025

The sky on 3 July 2025
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:58


Waxing Gibbous

60%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:48 14:43 21:38
Venus 03:00 09:52 16:44
Moon 14:02 19:35 01:01
Mars 10:19 16:47 23:14
Jupiter 05:15 12:26 19:36
Saturn 00:15 06:14 12:12
All times shown in PDT.

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

30 Jan 2013  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 2013  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
05 Jan 2014  –  Jupiter at opposition
06 Mar 2014  –  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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