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 3°35' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 14 days old.

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

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 16:46 and 05:07. They will become accessible at around 16:46, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 22:56, 62° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:07 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.8, and Jupiter at mag -2.9, both in the constellation Aries.

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 02h48m40s 11°14'N Aries -12.8 32'32"6
Jupiter 02h48m40s 14°50'N Aries -2.9 48"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 170° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 20 May 2024

The sky on 20 May 2024
Sunrise
05:15
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
22:06
Twilight begins
03:13

12-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

95%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:25 11:09 17:52
Venus 05:08 12:23 19:38
Moon 17:19 22:43 03:57
Mars 03:26 09:46 16:07
Jupiter 05:17 12:34 19:51
Saturn 02:28 08:07 13:47
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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04 Jan 2036  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
13 Oct 2036  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
12 Dec 2036  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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