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 4°21' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 13 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 evening sky, becoming accessible around 17:24 (PDT), 31° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 21:50, 79° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 04:15, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7 in the constellation Orion, and Jupiter at mag -2.7 in the neighbouring constellation of Gemini.

The pair 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.

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 06h06m50s 18°58'N Orion -12.7 31'47"6
Jupiter 06h06m50s 23°19'N Gemini -2.7 45"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 150° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 26 Apr 2026

The sky on 26 April 2026
Sunrise
06:05
Sunset
19:31
Twilight ends
21:02
Twilight begins
04:34


Waxing Gibbous

82%

9 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:26 11:43 17:59
Venus 07:30 14:35 21:39
Moon 15:06 21:33 03:50
Mars 05:07 11:21 17:35
Jupiter 10:41 17:50 00:58
Saturn 05:00 11:07 17:13
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.

Related news

26 Dec 2072  –  Jupiter at opposition
23 Feb 2073  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion
28 Nov 2073  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
27 Jan 2074  –  Jupiter at opposition

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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