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 18.2 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 23 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:42 (EST) – 2 hours and 54 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 22° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

The Moon will be at mag -11.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.3. Both objects will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

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 21h40m00s 14°19'S Capricornus -11.6 31'00"5
Jupiter 21h40m20s 14°37'S Capricornus -2.3 36"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 76° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Nov 2024

The sky on 23 November 2024
Sunrise
06:43
Sunset
16:15
Twilight ends
17:54
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Crescent

39%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:33 12:55 17:17
Venus 10:09 14:32 18:54
Moon 23:09 06:06 12:50
Mars 20:36 04:03 11:30
Jupiter 17:09 00:40 08:11
Saturn 12:58 18:29 23:59
All times shown in EST.

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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