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 3°25' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:01 (EDT) – 1 hour and 27 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 10° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:09.

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The Moon will be at mag -8.4, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

The pair 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.

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 07h16m00s 18°55'N Gemini -8.4 29'23"8
Jupiter 07h16m00s 22°21'N Gemini -1.9 31"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 4 May 2024

The sky on 4 May 2024
Sunrise
05:32
Sunset
19:47
Twilight ends
21:39
Twilight begins
03:41

26-day old moon
Waning Crescent

13%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 04:45 11:06 17:27
Venus 05:18 12:08 18:58
Moon 03:45 09:38 15:44
Mars 04:01 10:04 16:07
Jupiter 06:08 13:21 20:35
Saturn 03:28 09:06 14:44
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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19 Jan 2050  –  Jupiter at opposition
20 Mar 2050  –  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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Cambridge

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42.38°N
71.11°W
EDT

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