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°38' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 16 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From San Diego , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 18:52, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 01:11, 79° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 06:02, 25° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.7, and Jupiter at mag -2.8, 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 05h10m20s 27°52'N Taurus -12.7 32'25"3
Jupiter 05h10m20s 22°14'N Taurus -2.8 46"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 155° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 17 Nov 2024

The sky on 17 November 2024
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:11
Twilight begins
04:52

16-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

93%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:13 13:05 17:57
Venus 09:37 14:29 19:20
Moon 17:25 00:54 08:28
Mars 21:24 04:25 11:26
Jupiter 18:07 01:11 08:15
Saturn 13:16 18:56 00:35
All times shown in PST.

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
11 Nov 2025  –  Jupiter enters 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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32.72°N
117.16°W
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