Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 1°13' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 04:18 (PDT) – 2 hours and 18 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 19° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Sagittarius.

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 pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

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

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 18h47m10s 21°37'S Sagittarius -4.1 15"2
Jupiter 18h47m20s 22°51'S Sagittarius -1.9 32"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 May 2026

The sky on 10 May 2026
Sunrise
05:52
Sunset
19:42
Twilight ends
21:18
Twilight begins
04:16


Waning Crescent

35%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:42 12:29 19:16
Venus 07:37 14:52 22:06
Moon 02:13 07:40 13:14
Mars 04:40 11:06 17:31
Jupiter 09:56 17:03 00:11
Saturn 04:09 10:17 16:25
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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