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 30.0 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 22 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 00:12 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 57° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:03.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Pisces.

They 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.

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 01h45m20s 9°57'N Pisces -12.1 31'51"6
Jupiter 01h45m50s 9°29'N Pisces -2.5 41"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 98° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Apr 2025

The sky on 17 April 2025
Sunrise
06:48
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
05:11


Waning Gibbous

78%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:55 11:53 17:51
Venus 05:15 11:22 17:29
Moon 00:18 04:39 08:57
Mars 12:30 19:54 03:19
Jupiter 09:31 16:56 00:22
Saturn 05:44 11:36 17:28
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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