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 11' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 18 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 morning sky, becoming accessible around 20:31, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 03:08, 71° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:18, 46° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.6, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h00m50s 22°22'N Gemini -12.4 29'34"2
Jupiter 07h00m50s 22°34'N Gemini -2.6 43"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 130° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Apr 2025

The sky on 22 April 2025
Sunrise
06:00
Sunset
19:40
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:18


Waning Crescent

25%

24 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:10 11:12 17:14
Venus 04:24 10:30 16:36
Moon 03:28 08:23 13:27
Mars 11:39 19:05 02:31
Jupiter 08:32 16:02 23:31
Saturn 04:48 10:40 16:32
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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28 Feb 2085  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
03 Dec 2085  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion

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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