The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed

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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 1°11' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 7 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will become visible at around 17:07 (PDT), 51° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 22:53.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -11.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, both in the constellation Aquarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit 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 23h29m00s 5°54'S Aquarius -11.7 31'41"7
Jupiter 23h29m00s 4°42'S Aquarius -2.4 37"9

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

The sky on 24 May 2025

The sky on 24 May 2025
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
19:53
Twilight ends
21:33
Twilight begins
04:02

27-day old moon
Waning Crescent

7%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:23 12:20 19:17
Venus 03:32 09:50 16:07
Moon 03:43 10:27 17:22
Mars 11:08 18:00 00:51
Jupiter 07:13 14:24 21:34
Saturn 02:46 08:44 14:41
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

13 Nov 1998  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Aug 1999  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
23 Oct 1999  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Dec 1999  –  Jupiter ends 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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South El Monte

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.05°W
PDT

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