Close approach of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 5°29' of each other. The Moon will be 3 days old.

From South El Monte , the trio will become visible at around 20:19 (PDT), 26° above your western horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. They will then sink towards the horizon, setting 2 hours and 32 minutes after the Sun at 22:33.

The Moon will be at mag -10.5; Venus will be at mag -4.2; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.8. The trio will lie in the constellation Leo.

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 09h56m50s 7°55'N Leo -10.5 30'30"6
Venus 10h05m40s 12°59'N Leo -4.2 21"3
Jupiter 10h02m40s 12°59'N Leo -1.8 31"7

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The trio will be at an angular separation of 45° from the Sun, which is in Gemini at this time of year.

The sky on 6 Jul 2026

The sky on 6 July 2026
Sunrise
05:44
Sunset
20:06
Twilight ends
21:50
Twilight begins
04:00


Waning Gibbous

55%

22 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:41 13:33 20:25
Venus 09:06 15:49 22:31
Moon 23:37 05:44 11:59
Mars 03:03 10:07 17:10
Jupiter 07:05 14:06 21:07
Saturn 00:37 06:49 13:01
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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