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 5'18" to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 27 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 dawn sky, rising at 03:44 (EDT) – 1 hour and 32 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 12° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 04:56.

The Moon will be at mag -9.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h55m30s 15°48'N Aries -9.8 31'45"1
Jupiter 02h55m30s 15°43'N Aries -2.1 33"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 30° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Apr 2025

The sky on 4 April 2025
Sunrise
06:29
Sunset
19:20
Twilight ends
20:56
Twilight begins
04:53


Waxing Gibbous

53%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 11:47 17:48
Venus 05:16 11:34 17:52
Moon 10:53 18:59 02:58
Mars 12:12 19:46 03:20
Jupiter 09:31 16:59 00:27
Saturn 05:54 11:43 17:32
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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