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°23' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 3 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will become visible at around 20:43 (EST), 31° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 17 minutes after the Sun at 23:42.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5, 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 05h20m40s 28°16'N Taurus -10.5 32'40"1
Jupiter 05h20m40s 22°53'N Taurus -2.0 32"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 41° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Apr 2025

The sky on 30 April 2025
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
20:25
Twilight ends
22:08
Twilight begins
04:47


Waxing Crescent

16%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:41 11:55 18:08
Venus 04:47 10:53 16:59
Moon 08:23 16:23 00:27
Mars 12:09 19:27 02:45
Jupiter 08:50 16:16 23:42
Saturn 04:57 10:50 16:44
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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