Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within a mere 40.7 arcminutes of each other. The Moon will be 26 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:39 (PDT) – 3 hours and 41 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 39° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:04.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Venus will be at mag -4.6; and Saturn will be at mag 0.8. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

They will be a little too widely separated to fit comfortably 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 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 12h34m30s 3°22'S Virgo -10.7 32'03"9
Venus 12h37m10s 3°32'S Virgo -4.6 34"5
Saturn 12h38m10s 1°42'S Virgo 0.8 16"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 46° from the Sun, which is in Libra at this time of year.

The sky on 16 Jun 2026

The sky on 16 June 2026
Sunrise
05:37
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:52


Waxing Crescent

6%

2 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:28 14:37 21:46
Venus 08:32 15:36 22:40
Moon 07:12 14:43 22:06
Mars 03:34 10:26 17:19
Jupiter 08:03 15:07 22:11
Saturn 01:53 08:04 14:15
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE440 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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