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 5°40' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 23 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 dawn sky, rising at 00:09 (EDT) and reaching an altitude of 61° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:54.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.6, and Jupiter at mag -2.3, both in the constellation Taurus.

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 05h08m40s 27°53'N Taurus -11.6 31'15"2
Jupiter 05h08m40s 22°12'N Taurus -2.3 37"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 75° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Aug 2024

The sky on 27 August 2024
Sunrise
06:12
Sunset
19:33
Twilight ends
21:12
Twilight begins
04:32

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

32%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:12 11:58 18:45
Venus 08:08 14:19 20:29
Moon 23:34 07:33 15:38
Mars 00:33 08:04 15:36
Jupiter 00:09 07:37 15:04
Saturn 20:05 01:43 07:20
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.

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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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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