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°44' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 13 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 be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 16:42 (EST), 26° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:07, 62° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:13, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6 in the constellation Cetus, and Jupiter at mag -2.8 in the neighbouring constellation of 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 02h36m30s 10°16'N Cetus -12.6 32'19"4
Jupiter 02h36m30s 14°00'N Aries -2.8 46"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 140° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:47
Sunset
16:28
Twilight ends
18:05
Twilight begins
05:10


Waning Gibbous

50%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:40 13:06 17:32
Venus 10:13 14:39 19:06
Moon 22:16 05:32 12:36
Mars 20:52 04:15 11:38
Jupiter 17:26 00:53 08:20
Saturn 13:09 18:41 00:13
All times shown in EST.

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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08 Nov 2035  –  Jupiter at opposition
04 Jan 2036  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Oct 2036  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
12 Dec 2036  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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