Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within a mere 26.6 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:14 (PDT) – 1 hour and 22 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 11° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

The Moon will be at mag -9.5; Venus will be at mag -3.9; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 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 19h55m20s 20°29'S Sagittarius -9.5 30'58"2
Venus 19h54m50s 20°55'S Sagittarius -3.9 11"3
Jupiter 19h55m30s 21°00'S Sagittarius -1.9 31"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 26° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 27 Mar 2026

The sky on 27 March 2026
Sunrise
06:44
Sunset
19:08
Twilight ends
20:33
Twilight begins
05:19


Waxing Gibbous

73%

8 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:39 11:19 16:59
Venus 07:39 14:08 20:37
Moon 13:57 21:12 04:18
Mars 06:05 11:54 17:43
Jupiter 12:26 19:36 02:45
Saturn 06:49 12:51 18:54
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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