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 6°02' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 21 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 23:28, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 05:23, 59° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:39, 55° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9 in the constellation Sextans, and Jupiter at mag -2.2 in the neighbouring constellation of Leo.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 10h27m40s 4°36'N Sextans -11.9 29'37"6
Jupiter 10h27m40s 10°38'N Leo -2.2 37"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 96° from the Sun, which is in Ophiuchus at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Dec 2024

The sky on 11 December 2024
Sunrise
07:06
Sunset
16:23
Twilight ends
18:03
Twilight begins
05:26


Waxing Gibbous

87%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:01 10:54 15:48
Venus 10:16 14:59 19:43
Moon 13:36 20:36 03:51
Mars 19:41 03:06 10:31
Jupiter 15:58 23:24 06:50
Saturn 11:55 17:28 23:01
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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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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