Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within a mere 7.7 arcminutes of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Venus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 27 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 05:17 (PDT) – 1 hour and 42 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 15° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:44.

The Moon will be at mag -10.3; Venus will be at mag -4.0; and Uranus will be at mag 5.9. The trio will lie in the constellation Capricornus.

They will be close enough to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will also 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 Venus 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 21h09m40s 16°27'S Capricornus -10.3 30'56"9
Venus 21h09m50s 16°34'S Capricornus -4.0 13"2
Uranus 21h10m30s 16°56'S Capricornus 5.9 3"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 38° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 3 May 2026

The sky on 3 May 2026
Sunrise
05:58
Sunset
19:37
Twilight ends
21:10
Twilight begins
04:25


Waning Gibbous

94%

16 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:31 12:02 18:33
Venus 07:33 14:43 21:53
Moon 21:04 01:57 06:45
Mars 04:53 11:13 17:33
Jupiter 10:18 17:26 00:34
Saturn 04:35 10:42 16:49
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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