Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 5°17' of each other. The Moon will be 13 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:02 (EST), 31° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:15, 66° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:33, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Cancer.

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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 09h03m20s 12°19'N Cancer -12.5 29'29"7
Jupiter 09h08m30s 17°27'N Cancer -2.5 43"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 152° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Nov 2024

The sky on 25 November 2024
Sunrise
06:50
Sunset
16:26
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:13


Waning Crescent

23%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:30 12:58 17:26
Venus 10:15 14:43 19:11
Moon 01:23 07:34 13:35
Mars 20:42 04:05 11:28
Jupiter 17:13 00:40 08:07
Saturn 12:57 18:29 00:01
All times shown in EST.

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 Feb 2015  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Apr 2015  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
07 Jan 2016  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
08 Mar 2016  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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