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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°10' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 9 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 be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:28 (EDT), 68° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 20:40, 74° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:15, when they sink below 7° above your north-western horizon.

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 -12.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.4, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 06h44m40s 18°06'N Gemini -12.1 29'32"3
Jupiter 06h44m40s 23°17'N Gemini -2.4 40"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 110° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius 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

81%

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

06 Mar 2014  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
08 Dec 2014  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
06 Feb 2015  –  Jupiter at opposition
08 Apr 2015  –  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.

Share

Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

Color scheme