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°59' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:44 (EDT) – 3 hours and 13 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 29° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:38.

The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h41m00s 17°32'N Gemini -10.1 29'25"0
Jupiter 07h41m00s 21°31'N Gemini -1.9 32"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 18 May 2024

The sky on 18 May 2024
Sunrise
05:17
Sunset
20:02
Twilight ends
22:03
Twilight begins
03:16


Waxing Gibbous

80%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:26 11:06 17:46
Venus 05:09 12:21 19:33
Moon 15:14 21:22 03:19
Mars 03:30 09:48 16:07
Jupiter 05:23 12:40 19:57
Saturn 02:36 08:15 13:54
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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