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°35' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 4 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:14 (EST), 42° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 23:07.

The Moon will be at mag -10.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, 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 02h44m40s 18°36'N Aries -10.9 32'20"5
Jupiter 02h44m40s 15°00'N Aries -2.1 34"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 50° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Mar 2024

The sky on 13 March 2024
Sunrise
07:05
Sunset
18:57
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:33


Waxing Crescent

23%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:36 13:48 20:00
Venus 06:22 11:42 17:03
Moon 08:50 15:57 23:18
Mars 05:58 11:06 16:15
Jupiter 09:12 16:09 23:06
Saturn 06:47 12:18 17:50
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.

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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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