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 1°59' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 06:08 (EDT) – 1 hour and 13 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 8° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 07:03.

The Moon will be at mag -8.1, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Libra.

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 14h53m40s 17°36'S Libra -8.1 30'27"4
Jupiter 14h53m40s 15°37'S Libra -1.7 30"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 13° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2024

The sky on 2 July 2024
Sunrise
06:04
Sunset
21:04
Twilight ends
23:06
Twilight begins
04:02


Waning Crescent

6%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:34 14:56 22:18
Venus 06:40 14:07 21:35
Moon 02:52 10:30 18:19
Mars 02:47 09:46 16:44
Jupiter 03:55 11:13 18:32
Saturn 00:28 06:11 11:53
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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