Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

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The Moon, Venus and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 6°58' of each other. The Moon will be 4 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 19:29 (PDT), 38° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 3 hours and 34 minutes after the Sun at 22:47.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Uranus will be at mag 5.8. The trio will lie in the constellation Taurus.

They 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.

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 04h10m00s 16°14'N Taurus -10.5 30'12"6
Venus 04h03m30s 23°02'N Taurus -4.2 17"8
Uranus 04h03m10s 20°36'N Taurus 5.8 3"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 43° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Jun 2026

The sky on 28 June 2026
Sunrise
05:40
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:55


Waxing Gibbous

99%

14 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:17 14:14 21:11
Venus 08:53 15:45 22:37
Moon 18:47 --:-- 04:10
Mars 03:15 10:14 17:14
Jupiter 07:28 14:30 21:32
Saturn 01:08 07:19 13:31
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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10 May 2111  –  Venus at greatest elongation east
28 Sep 2111  –  Venus at greatest elongation west

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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