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°40' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Ashburn however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 3° above the horizon at dawn.

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The Moon will be at mag -7.9, and Jupiter at mag -2.0, 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 04h00m50s 24°33'N Taurus -7.9 32'00"5
Jupiter 04h00m50s 19°53'N Taurus -2.0 32"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 12° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Jun 2024

The sky on 5 June 2024
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:32
Twilight ends
22:29
Twilight begins
03:44

28-day old moon
Waning Crescent

0%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:08 12:21 19:35
Venus 05:45 13:08 20:30
Moon 04:35 12:16 20:08
Mars 03:20 09:54 16:27
Jupiter 05:00 12:12 19:24
Saturn 01:50 07:33 13:16
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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07 Dec 2024  –  Jupiter at opposition
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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Ashburn

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

39.04°N
77.49°W
EDT

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