Close approach of the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn will make a close approach, passing within 5°54' of each other. The Moon will be 25 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:05 (PDT) – 3 hours and 49 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 41° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:37.

The Moon will be at mag -10.7; Jupiter will be at mag -2.1; and Saturn will be at mag -0.1. 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 Jupiter 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 04h52m40s 27°36'N Taurus -10.7 29'27"6
Jupiter 04h48m30s 21°46'N Taurus -2.1 33"3
Saturn 04h55m20s 20°59'N Taurus -0.1 17"2

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 52° from the Sun, which is in Cancer at this time of year.

The sky on 4 Jul 2026

The sky on 4 July 2026
Sunrise
05:43
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
03:59


Waning Gibbous

72%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:52 13:45 20:38
Venus 09:03 15:48 22:33
Moon 22:45 04:18 09:58
Mars 03:06 10:08 17:11
Jupiter 07:10 14:12 21:13
Saturn 00:45 06:56 13:08
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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