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 29' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 17 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 18:59, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:38, 71° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:27, 27° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.5 in the constellation Orion, and Jupiter at mag -2.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Taurus.

The pair will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 05h52m40s 22°27'N Orion -12.5 29'26"3
Jupiter 05h52m40s 22°57'N Taurus -2.7 45"8

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 152° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2024

The sky on 4 July 2024
Sunrise
05:23
Sunset
20:28
Twilight ends
22:34
Twilight begins
03:16


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 14:23 21:45
Venus 06:02 13:31 21:01
Moon 03:35 11:45 19:58
Mars 02:02 09:05 16:07
Jupiter 03:06 10:28 17:50
Saturn 23:43 05:24 11:05
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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13 Feb 2049  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
20 Nov 2049  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion

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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