Conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Jupiter will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 4°35' to the south of Jupiter. The Moon will be 2 days old.

From South El Monte , the pair will be difficult to observe as they will appear no higher than 8° above the horizon. They will become visible at around 17:15 (PDT), 8° above your south-western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 1 hour and 8 minutes after the Sun at 18:06.

The Moon will be at mag -8.0, and Jupiter at mag -1.9, both in the constellation Capricornus.

The pair 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.

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

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 20h42m30s 23°22'S Capricornus -8.0 29'22"1
Jupiter 20h42m30s 18°46'S Capricornus -1.9 31"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 14° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Jul 2026

The sky on 2 July 2026
Sunrise
05:42
Sunset
20:07
Twilight ends
21:51
Twilight begins
03:57


Waning Gibbous

87%

18 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:02 13:56 20:50
Venus 09:00 15:47 22:34
Moon 21:45 02:49 07:58
Mars 03:09 10:10 17:12
Jupiter 07:16 14:18 21:20
Saturn 00:52 07:04 13:16
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

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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