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

Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 11.4 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 28 days old.

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:41 (EST) – 1 hour and 53 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:14.

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The Moon will be at mag -9.4; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h05m40s 22°58'N Gemini -9.4 32'37"3
Jupiter 06h05m40s 23°09'N Gemini -1.9 32"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 25° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2024

The sky on 24 November 2024
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
16:27
Twilight ends
18:04
Twilight begins
05:12

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

28%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:34 13:01 17:28
Venus 10:14 14:42 19:09
Moon 00:22 06:55 13:17
Mars 20:46 04:08 11:31
Jupiter 17:18 00:45 08:11
Saturn 13:01 18:33 00:05
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.

Related news

25 Jan 2001  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
02 Nov 2001  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
01 Jan 2002  –  Jupiter at opposition
01 Mar 2002  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

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