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 43' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 14 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 between 21:11 and 05:09. They will become accessible at around 21:11, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 01:10, 29° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:09 when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.8, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair 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.

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 20h35m50s 20°03'S Capricornus -12.7 31'39"4
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 24 Jul 2024

The sky on 24 July 2024
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
20:17
Twilight ends
22:13
Twilight begins
03:41


Waning Gibbous

84%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:01 14:42 21:23
Venus 06:47 13:55 21:02
Moon 22:03 03:35 09:18
Mars 01:26 08:43 16:00
Jupiter 02:02 09:27 16:51
Saturn 22:23 04:04 09:44
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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