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 49.3 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 10 days old.

From Hackensack , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:47 (EDT), 35° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:28, 36° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:57, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.4. Both objects will lie in the constellation Libra.

They 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.

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 14h25m40s 12°17'S Libra -12.4 30'39"3
Jupiter 14h24m50s 13°05'S Libra -2.4 41"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 131° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2025

The sky on 23 April 2025
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
19:43
Twilight ends
21:26
Twilight begins
04:20


Waning Crescent

22%

25 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 11:15 17:18
Venus 04:25 10:31 16:37
Moon 03:57 09:16 14:45
Mars 11:41 19:06 02:30
Jupiter 08:33 16:02 23:31
Saturn 04:47 10:39 16:31
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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04 Jun 2090  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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