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 16' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 21 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 00:19, when they reach an altitude of 7° above your north-eastern horizon. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 06:55, 72° above your southern horizon. They will be lost to dawn twilight around 07:06, 72° above your southern horizon.

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The Moon will be at mag -11.9 in the constellation Orion, and Jupiter at mag -2.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Taurus.

The pair 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.

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 05h58m50s 22°39'N Orion -11.9 29'32"9
Jupiter 05h58m50s 22°55'N Taurus -2.4 39"6

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 96° from the Sun, which is in Virgo at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
07:23
Sunset
17:10
Twilight ends
18:45
Twilight begins
05:47

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

44%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 09:15 13:45 18:15
Venus 10:48 15:18 19:49
Moon 22:59 06:12 13:13
Mars 21:34 04:54 12:13
Jupiter 18:09 01:32 08:56
Saturn 13:47 19:20 00:53
All times shown in EST.

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 Feb 2049  –  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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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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