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 5°21' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 5 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 18:34 (PDT), 24° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 57 minutes after the Sun at 21:15.

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 -10.9, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope or pair of binoculars, but will be visible to the naked eye.

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 17h01m40s 27°48'S Ophiuchus -10.9 29'38"1
Jupiter 17h01m40s 22°27'S Ophiuchus -1.9 33"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 54° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 8 Sep 2025

The sky on 8 September 2025
Sunrise
06:28
Sunset
19:07
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:02

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

98%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:07 12:34 19:01
Venus 04:08 10:56 17:45
Moon 19:19 01:16 07:22
Mars 09:14 14:55 20:37
Jupiter 01:55 09:01 16:08
Saturn 19:46 01:42 07:37
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

06 Aug 2007  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
09 May 2008  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
09 Jul 2008  –  Jupiter at opposition
07 Sep 2008  –  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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