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 4°42' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:25 (EST) – 3 hours and 28 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 32° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:34.

The Moon will be at mag -10.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They 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.

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 07h09m20s 27°09'N Gemini -10.4 31'45"0
Jupiter 07h06m00s 22°30'N Gemini -2.0 32"8

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

The sky on 19 Aug 2025

The sky on 19 August 2025
Sunrise
05:53
Sunset
19:39
Twilight ends
21:24
Twilight begins
04:07


Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:22 11:32 18:42
Venus 03:02 10:28 17:54
Moon 01:26 09:38 17:43
Mars 09:26 15:19 21:12
Jupiter 02:25 09:57 17:30
Saturn 21:02 02:58 08:53
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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