Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°10' of each other. The Moon will be 23 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:29 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 68° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:35.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.2. 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 07h45m20s 25°30'N Gemini -11.9 31'35"0
Jupiter 07h41m20s 21°26'N Gemini -2.2 37"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 86° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Oct 2025

The sky on 13 October 2025
Sunrise
06:52
Sunset
18:05
Twilight ends
19:38
Twilight begins
05:18


Waning Crescent

41%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:40 13:41 18:43
Venus 05:05 11:14 17:23
Moon 22:18 06:26 14:25
Mars 08:59 14:00 19:02
Jupiter 23:29 06:56 14:24
Saturn 17:14 23:03 04:53
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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