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 24' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 13 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:31 (EDT), 23° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:38, 70° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 05:07, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.8, both in the constellation Taurus.

The pair 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.

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 04h26m10s 20°32'N Taurus -12.5 29'24"6
Jupiter 04h26m10s 20°57'N Taurus -2.8 46"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 153° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Apr 2024

The sky on 25 April 2024
Sunrise
06:37
Sunset
20:20
Twilight ends
22:01
Twilight begins
04:56

17-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

96%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:55 12:15 18:34
Venus 06:18 12:49 19:21
Moon 21:21 02:21 07:14
Mars 05:08 11:02 16:55
Jupiter 07:31 14:36 21:41
Saturn 04:47 10:26 16:04
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

02 Dec 2012  –  Jupiter at opposition
30 Jan 2013  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 2013  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
05 Jan 2014  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

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