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 6°33' to the north of Jupiter. The Moon will be 9 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 17:03 (PDT), 54° above your south-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then reach their highest point in the sky at 18:50, 64° above your southern horizon. They will continue to be observable until around 00:33, when they sink below 7° above your western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.1, and Jupiter at mag -2.6, both in the constellation Pisces.

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 01h30m30s 14°38'N Pisces -12.1 29'30"7
Jupiter 01h30m30s 8°05'N Pisces -2.6 42"1

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 109° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 May 2026

The sky on 2 May 2026
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:36
Twilight ends
21:09
Twilight begins
04:26


Waning Gibbous

96%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:30 11:59 18:28
Venus 07:32 14:42 21:51
Moon 20:04 01:09 06:08
Mars 04:55 11:14 17:34
Jupiter 10:21 17:30 00:38
Saturn 04:39 10:45 16:52
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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