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°37' 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 4° above the horizon at dusk.

The Moon will be at mag -8.8, and Jupiter at mag -1.7, both in the constellation Leo.

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 11h28m40s 2°05'S Leo -8.8 33'11"6
Jupiter 11h28m40s 4°32'N Leo -1.7 30"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 18° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 25 Apr 2026

The sky on 25 April 2026
Sunrise
06:07
Sunset
19:30
Twilight ends
21:01
Twilight begins
04:36


Waxing Gibbous

70%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:40 17:54
Venus 07:30 14:33 21:37
Moon 14:04 20:48 03:24
Mars 05:09 11:22 17:35
Jupiter 10:45 17:53 01:02
Saturn 05:04 11:10 17:16
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

30 Apr 1992  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Jan 1993  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
30 Mar 1993  –  Jupiter at opposition
31 May 1993  –  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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