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 3°05' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 4 days old.

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

From Fairfield , the pair will become visible at around 20:28 (EDT), 37° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 51 minutes after the Sun at 23:59.

The Moon will be at mag -11.0, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Gemini.

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 07h33m40s 25°10'N Gemini -11.0 32'40"9
Jupiter 07h33m40s 22°05'N Gemini -1.9 33"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 20 May 2026

The sky on 20 May 2026
Sunrise
05:27
Sunset
20:08
Twilight ends
22:06
Twilight begins
03:31


Waxing Crescent

23%

4 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:49 13:17 20:46
Venus 07:25 15:06 22:46
Moon 08:56 16:53 00:38
Mars 04:13 10:56 17:38
Jupiter 09:06 16:32 23:59
Saturn 03:32 09:43 15:54
All times shown in EDT.

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.

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12 Dec 2026  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
10 Feb 2027  –  Jupiter at opposition
12 Apr 2027  –  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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