Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 5°32' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 23 days old.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:03 (PDT) and reaching an altitude of 45° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:17.

The Moon will be at mag -11.9 in the constellation Pisces, and Jupiter at mag -2.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair 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.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 23h26m20s 0°40'N Pisces -11.9 32'04"4
Jupiter 23h26m20s 4°51'S Aquarius -2.4 39"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 88° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 23 Apr 2026

The sky on 23 April 2026
Sunrise
06:09
Sunset
19:29
Twilight ends
20:59
Twilight begins
04:39


Waxing Crescent

47%

6 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:25 11:36 17:46
Venus 07:30 14:31 21:33
Moon 11:49 19:09 02:19
Mars 05:13 11:24 17:36
Jupiter 10:51 18:00 01:09
Saturn 05:11 11:17 17:23
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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