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

Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 31' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 22 days old.

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

From Los Angeles , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 23:40 (PST) and reaching an altitude of 64° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:39.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.5, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h45m50s 10°00'N Pisces -12.1 31'51"7
Jupiter 01h45m50s 9°29'N Pisces -2.5 41"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 98° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 22 Nov 2024

The sky on 22 November 2024
Sunrise
06:30
Sunset
16:45
Twilight ends
18:12
Twilight begins
05:02

21-day old moon
Waning Crescent

42%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:17 13:06 17:54
Venus 09:50 14:39 19:28
Moon 22:39 05:37 12:27
Mars 21:10 04:14 11:18
Jupiter 17:46 00:53 08:00
Saturn 13:02 18:40 00:19
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.

Related news

07 Nov 2069  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
18 Aug 2070  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
17 Oct 2070  –  Jupiter at opposition
14 Dec 2070  –  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.

Share

Los Angeles

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

34.05°N
118.24°W
PST

Color scheme