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°05' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 19:28 (EDT), 29° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 1 minute after the Sun at 22:12.

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The Moon will be at mag -10.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation 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 02h38m40s 17°37'N Aries -10.1 29'26"1
Jupiter 02h38m40s 14°32'N Aries -2.1 33"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 37° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Apr 2024

The sky on 24 April 2024
Sunrise
05:57
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:26
Twilight begins
04:14

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

98%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:18 11:39 18:00
Venus 05:39 12:10 18:41
Moon 19:38 00:56 06:05
Mars 04:32 10:24 16:16
Jupiter 06:52 14:00 21:08
Saturn 04:13 09:50 15:28
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

25 Dec 2011  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
04 Oct 2012  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
02 Dec 2012  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Jan 2013  –  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
EDT

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