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 3°52' of each other. The Moon will be 14 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the evening sky, becoming accessible around 20:16 (PDT), 14° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 23:55, 35° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:14, when they sink below 7° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.8; Jupiter will be at mag -2.5; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. The trio will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

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 16h04m50s 23°48'S Scorpius -12.8 33'18"4
Jupiter 16h06m50s 19°58'S Scorpius -2.5 44"2
Uranus 16h03m10s 20°34'S Scorpius 5.5 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 167° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 15 Jun 2026

The sky on 15 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:04
Twilight ends
21:49
Twilight begins
03:52


Waxing Crescent

0%

0 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:27 14:37 21:47
Venus 08:30 15:35 22:40
Moon 05:58 13:37 21:13
Mars 03:36 10:27 17:19
Jupiter 08:06 15:10 22:14
Saturn 01:57 08:07 14:18
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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