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 5°22' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will become visible at around 20:01 (EST), 30° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 21 minutes after the Sun at 23:03.

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 -10.5; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.0. Both objects will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

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 05h18m50s 28°14'N Taurus -10.5 32'40"9
Jupiter 05h20m40s 22°53'N Taurus -2.0 32"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 30 Apr 2025

The sky on 30 April 2025
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:32
Twilight begins
03:49

3-day old moon
Waxing Crescent

16%

3 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:53 11:07 17:22
Venus 03:59 10:06 16:12
Moon 07:23 15:34 23:47
Mars 11:14 18:39 02:04
Jupiter 07:54 15:29 23:03
Saturn 04:10 10:03 15:55
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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11 Nov 2025  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Jan 2026  –  Jupiter at opposition
10 Mar 2026  –  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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Cambridge

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Longitude:
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42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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