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 3°27' of each other. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible between 17:36 and 05:52. They will become accessible at around 17:36, when they rise to an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 23:44, 64° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 05:52 when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.8; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aries.

They 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.

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 02h52m30s 11°30'N Aries -12.8 32'34"0
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 3 Jun 2024

The sky on 3 June 2024
Sunrise
06:01
Sunset
20:56
Twilight ends
22:56
Twilight begins
04:02

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

9%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:23 12:35 19:46
Venus 06:03 13:27 20:51
Moon 03:49 10:49 18:03
Mars 03:45 10:18 16:51
Jupiter 05:26 12:40 19:54
Saturn 02:21 08:02 13:44
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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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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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

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