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 1°28' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 7 days old.

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

From Ashburn , the pair will become visible at around 19:35 (EDT), 62° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:16.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.2, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 04h31m40s 19°58'N Taurus -11.4 29'35"8
Jupiter 04h31m40s 21°27'N Taurus -2.2 36"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 71° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2024

The sky on 29 March 2024
Sunrise
06:56
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
05:25

19-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

82%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:25 14:12 20:58
Venus 06:23 12:11 17:59
Moon 23:04 04:01 08:52
Mars 05:41 11:08 16:35
Jupiter 08:39 15:36 22:33
Saturn 06:03 11:39 17:15
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

30 Jan 2013  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
06 Nov 2013  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
05 Jan 2014  –  Jupiter at opposition
06 Mar 2014  –  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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Ashburn

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39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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