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 4°34' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 1 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 6° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.5 in the constellation Scorpius, and Jupiter at mag -1.8 in the neighbouring constellation of Ophiuchus.

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 16h47m20s 26°30'S Scorpius -8.5 30'01"9
Jupiter 16h47m20s 21°55'S Ophiuchus -1.8 30"8

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

The sky on 14 May 2026

The sky on 14 May 2026
Sunrise
05:48
Sunset
19:45
Twilight ends
21:22
Twilight begins
04:12


Waning Crescent

2%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:51 12:47 19:44
Venus 07:41 14:57 22:13
Moon 04:06 10:46 17:37
Mars 04:32 11:01 17:30
Jupiter 09:43 16:50 23:58
Saturn 03:55 10:03 16:11
All times shown in PDT.

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.

Related news

24 Jul 1971  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
24 Apr 1972  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
24 Jun 1972  –  Jupiter at opposition
25 Aug 1972  –  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