Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 6°13' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 25 days old.

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

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:38 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 34° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:39.

The Moon will be at mag -11.2 in the constellation Scorpius, and Jupiter at mag -1.9 in the neighbouring constellation of Libra.

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 15h59m10s 25°50'S Scorpius -11.2 31'00"4
Jupiter 15h59m10s 19°37'S Libra -1.9 33"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 59° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 24 Apr 2026

The sky on 24 April 2026
Sunrise
06:08
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:00
Twilight begins
04:37


Waxing Gibbous

60%

7 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:38 17:50
Venus 07:30 14:32 21:35
Moon 12:58 20:01 02:54
Mars 05:11 11:23 17:36
Jupiter 10:48 17:56 01:05
Saturn 05:08 11:14 17:20
All times shown in PDT.

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

23 Jun 1970  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
23 Mar 1971  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
23 May 1971  –  Jupiter at opposition
24 Jul 1971  –  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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