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 34' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 20 days old.

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

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the morning sky, becoming accessible around 21:42, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 04:10, 70° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:08, 47° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Cancer.

The pair will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 08h04m50s 21°09'N Cancer -12.5 31'25"0
Jupiter 08h04m50s 20°35'N Cancer -2.5 42"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 126° from the Sun, which is in Scorpius at this time of year.

The sky on 5 Apr 2025

The sky on 5 April 2025
Sunrise
07:07
Sunset
19:59
Twilight ends
21:34
Twilight begins
05:33

7-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

63%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:22 12:22 18:21
Venus 05:51 12:08 18:24
Moon 12:47 20:35 04:14
Mars 12:53 20:22 03:52
Jupiter 10:10 17:35 00:59
Saturn 06:28 12:18 18:08
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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17 Dec 2038  –  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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Columbus

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Longitude:
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39.96°N
83.00°W
EDT

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