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°30' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 21:14 (EDT), 25° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 48 minutes after the Sun at 23:42.

The Moon will be at mag -10.2, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h27m40s 16°44'N Gemini -10.2 29'37"5
Jupiter 07h27m40s 22°14'N Gemini -1.9 32"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 May 2024

The sky on 1 May 2024
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
22:10
Twilight begins
04:45


Waning Crescent

44%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:40 11:58 18:16
Venus 06:12 12:53 19:34
Moon 03:04 07:53 12:49
Mars 04:55 10:55 16:55
Jupiter 07:11 14:18 21:24
Saturn 04:25 10:04 15:43
All times shown in EDT.

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 Mar 2014  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Dec 2014  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
06 Feb 2015  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Apr 2015  –  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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