The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 3°19' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From San Diego , the pair will become visible at around 19:10 (PST), 44° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 53 minutes after the Sun at 22:47.

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 -10.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.1. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 02h39m10s 18°05'N Aries -10.9 32'23"4
Jupiter 02h44m30s 15°00'N Aries -2.1 34"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 49° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 13 Mar 2024

The sky on 13 March 2024
Sunrise
06:58
Sunset
18:54
Twilight ends
20:17
Twilight begins
05:36

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

22%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:34 13:44 19:54
Venus 06:06 11:38 17:10
Moon 09:05 16:00 23:03
Mars 05:39 11:02 16:25
Jupiter 09:22 16:04 22:47
Saturn 06:34 12:13 17:53
All times shown in PDT.

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.

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04 Feb 2025  –  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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San Diego

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Longitude:
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32.72°N
117.16°W
PST

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