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 a mere 16.9 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 12 days old.

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:52 (PST), 40° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:32, 78° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:54, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 07h28m10s 22°02'N Gemini -12.6 31'45"7
Jupiter 07h28m20s 22°19'N Gemini -2.5 43"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 142° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Nov 2024

The sky on 24 November 2024
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
16:44
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:04

23-day old moon
Waning Crescent

28%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:11 13:01 17:50
Venus 09:52 14:42 19:32
Moon 00:35 07:00 13:17
Mars 21:04 04:08 11:12
Jupiter 17:37 00:44 07:51
Saturn 12:54 18:33 00:11
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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15 Mar 2038  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
17 Dec 2038  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
14 Feb 2039  –  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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