Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 32.9 arcminutes of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:31 (PDT) – 2 hours and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 28° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:57.

Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.7. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 12h33m50s 1°49'S Virgo -4.0 13"1
Jupiter 12h33m00s 2°19'S Virgo -1.7 30"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 34° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jun 2026

The sky on 2 June 2026
Sunrise
05:38
Sunset
19:58
Twilight ends
21:41
Twilight begins
03:56


Waning Gibbous

93%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:55 14:14 21:33
Venus 08:07 15:21 22:36
Moon 21:44 02:25 07:07
Mars 03:58 10:41 17:24
Jupiter 08:45 15:50 22:56
Saturn 02:45 08:55 15:05
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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

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03 Apr 2005  –  Jupiter at opposition
05 Jun 2005  –  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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