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 27.9 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 8 days old.

From Jacksonville , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 18:14 (EDT), 67° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 19:45, 80° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 01:55, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.3; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h11m10s 20°56'N Taurus -12.3 32'03"1
Jupiter 04h11m40s 20°29'N Taurus -2.5 41"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 111° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Jul 2024

The sky on 22 July 2024
Sunrise
06:36
Sunset
20:26
Twilight ends
21:59
Twilight begins
05:03


Waning Gibbous

95%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:47 15:17 21:47
Venus 07:39 14:26 21:14
Moon 21:06 02:22 07:44
Mars 02:28 09:19 16:10
Jupiter 03:10 10:07 17:03
Saturn 22:58 04:45 10:33
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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