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 6°24' of each other. The Moon will be 24 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:49 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 42° above the southern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:36.

The Moon will be at mag -11.5; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 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 14h04m50s 18°13'S Virgo -11.5 32'24"3
Jupiter 14h13m40s 12°11'S Virgo -1.9 33"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 65° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 12 Jun 2026

The sky on 12 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:03
Twilight ends
21:48
Twilight begins
03:53


Waning Crescent

7%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:22 14:36 21:49
Venus 08:25 15:32 22:40
Moon 03:11 10:21 17:40
Mars 03:41 10:30 17:20
Jupiter 08:15 15:19 22:23
Saturn 02:08 08:18 14:29
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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