Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 42.5 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible between 20:47 and 05:30. They will become accessible at around 20:47, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 01:09, 36° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:30 when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.8. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 20h36m20s 20°02'S Capricornus -12.7 31'39"2
Jupiter 20h35m50s 19°20'S Capricornus -2.8 47"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 177° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jul 2025

The sky on 5 July 2025
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waxing Gibbous

78%

10 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:43 21:35
Venus 03:00 09:53 16:46
Moon 15:58 21:02 02:00
Mars 10:17 16:43 23:09
Jupiter 05:09 12:20 19:30
Saturn 00:07 06:06 12:05
All times shown in PDT.

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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