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 34' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 22 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:53 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 64° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:08.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.2, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h52m00s 23°15'N Gemini -11.5 29'32"6
Jupiter 06h52m00s 22°41'N Gemini -2.2 36"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 77° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Jul 2024

The sky on 23 July 2024
Sunrise
05:25
Sunset
20:12
Twilight ends
22:14
Twilight begins
03:23


Waning Gibbous

93%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:50 14:34 21:19
Venus 06:33 13:45 20:57
Moon 21:30 02:34 07:48
Mars 01:15 08:35 15:56
Jupiter 01:53 09:21 16:50
Saturn 22:20 03:59 09:39
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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