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°01' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:09 (EST) – 2 hours and 13 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 19° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:02.

The Moon will be at mag -9.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h27m00s 26°02'N Taurus -9.9 31'35"2
Jupiter 04h27m00s 21°00'N Taurus -2.0 32"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 32° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2024

The sky on 3 July 2024
Sunrise
05:22
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:35
Twilight begins
03:15


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:57 14:20 21:44
Venus 06:00 13:30 21:00
Moon 02:54 10:46 18:47
Mars 02:04 09:06 16:08
Jupiter 03:09 10:31 17:53
Saturn 23:46 05:28 11:09
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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