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 4°58' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 12 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 be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:39 (EDT), 42° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:13, 72° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:53, when they sink below 7° above your north-western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.4, and Jupiter at mag -2.6, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h48m20s 18°12'N Gemini -12.4 29'25"7
Jupiter 06h48m20s 23°10'N Gemini -2.6 43"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 139° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Mar 2024

The sky on 28 March 2024
Sunrise
06:40
Sunset
19:13
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
05:06

18-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

84%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:08 13:57 20:46
Venus 06:08 11:53 17:38
Moon 21:47 02:58 08:00
Mars 05:29 10:52 16:16
Jupiter 08:21 15:22 22:23
Saturn 05:52 11:26 17:00
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

05 Jan 2014  –  Jupiter at opposition
06 Mar 2014  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Dec 2014  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
06 Feb 2015  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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