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 5°38' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 24 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:23 (EDT) – 3 hours and 55 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:01.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.5, and Jupiter at mag -2.1, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair 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.

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 17h59m30s 28°37'S Sagittarius -11.5 30'11"5
Jupiter 17h59m30s 22°59'S Sagittarius -2.1 35"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 74° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Jul 2024

The sky on 25 July 2024
Sunrise
05:39
Sunset
20:16
Twilight ends
22:11
Twilight begins
03:43

20-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

69%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:02 14:41 21:20
Venus 06:50 13:56 21:02
Moon 22:28 04:24 10:33
Mars 01:24 08:42 16:00
Jupiter 01:59 09:24 16:48
Saturn 22:19 04:00 09:40
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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20 Aug 2043  –  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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Fairfield

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41.14°N
73.26°W
EDT

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