Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Neptune

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Neptune will make a close approach, passing within 5°27' of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:37 (PST) – 2 hours and 10 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 20° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:32.

The Moon will be at mag -10.8 in Capricornus; Venus will be at mag -4.4 in Aquarius; and Neptune will be at mag 8.0 in Capricornus.

They 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.

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

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

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

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 21h31m10s 18°38'S Capricornus -10.8 32'53"5
Venus 21h22m20s 13°36'S Aquarius -4.4 24"3
Neptune 21h18m40s 15°50'S Capricornus 8.0 2"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Feb 2026

The sky on 15 February 2026
Sunrise
06:34
Sunset
17:35
Twilight ends
18:59
Twilight begins
05:10


Waning Crescent

1%

28 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:23 13:09 18:56
Venus 07:09 12:43 18:17
Moon 05:45 10:46 15:53
Mars 06:15 11:32 16:48
Jupiter 14:05 21:15 04:24
Saturn 08:14 14:11 20:08
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

25 Mar 2006  –  Venus at greatest elongation west
14 May 2007  –  Venus at highest altitude in evening sky
09 Jun 2007  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
25 Oct 2007  –  Venus at highest altitude in morning sky

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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