Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Mars

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Mars will make a close approach, passing within 3°08' 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 02:42 (PDT) – 3 hours and 45 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 38° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:10.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Mars will be at mag 1.7. The trio will lie in the constellation Virgo.

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 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 13h08m00s 1°48'S Virgo -10.7 30'38"3
Venus 13h05m20s 4°53'S Virgo -4.1 15"3
Mars 13h02m20s 5°21'S Virgo 1.7 4"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 Scorpius 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.

Related news

16 Jun 2110  –  Mars ends retrograde motion
31 May 2112  –  Mars enters retrograde motion
02 Jul 2112  –  Mars at opposition
09 Jul 2112  –  Mars at perigee

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Share