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 3°56' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 20 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 22:21, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:20, 59° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 05:49, 53° above your south-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.4 in the constellation Cetus, and Jupiter at mag -2.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Aries.

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 02h12m30s 7°51'N Cetus -12.4 32'09"8
Jupiter 02h12m30s 11°48'N Aries -2.7 44"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 123° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Sep 2024

The sky on 1 September 2024
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:17
Twilight ends
20:57
Twilight begins
04:27

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:42 11:35 18:28
Venus 08:11 14:13 20:14
Moon 04:22 11:47 18:59
Mars 00:13 07:49 15:26
Jupiter 23:40 07:11 14:42
Saturn 19:37 01:13 06:49
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.

Related news

24 Aug 1999  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
23 Oct 1999  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Dec 1999  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
29 Sep 2000  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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