Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°45' of each other. The Moon will be 12 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 19:47 (PDT), 40° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 22:25, 57° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 03:49, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.6; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.4. Both objects 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 pair 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 pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 11h56m10s 3°05'S Virgo -12.6 33'02"3
Jupiter 12h04m50s 1°07'N Virgo -2.4 41"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 142° from the Sun, which is in Aries at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jun 2026

The sky on 11 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
03:53


Waning Crescent

12%

26 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:21 14:35 21:48
Venus 08:23 15:31 22:40
Moon 02:34 09:25 16:25
Mars 03:42 10:31 17:21
Jupiter 08:18 15:22 22:27
Saturn 02:12 08:22 14:33
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.

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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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