Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Jupiter and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 2°45' of each other. The Moon will be 8 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:16 (PDT), 57° above your southern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting at 01:52.

The Moon will be at mag -12.0; Jupiter will be at mag -2.1; and Uranus will be at mag 5.4. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They 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.

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 Jupiter 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 11h43m00s 0°20'N Virgo -12.0 30'11"8
Jupiter 11h46m30s 2°56'N Virgo -2.1 37"3
Uranus 11h44m30s 2°29'N Virgo 5.4 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 101° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Mar 2026

The sky on 23 March 2026
Sunrise
06:49
Sunset
19:05
Twilight ends
20:29
Twilight begins
05:25


Waxing Crescent

30%

5 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:46 11:27 17:08
Venus 07:42 14:06 20:29
Moon 09:41 17:12 00:49
Mars 06:12 11:58 17:43
Jupiter 12:41 19:50 03:00
Saturn 07:03 13:05 19:07
All times shown in PDT.

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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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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