Close approach of Venus and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The planets Venus and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 1°12' of each other.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 02:57 (PDT) – 3 hours and 16 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 35° above the eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:57.

Venus will be at mag -4.1; and Jupiter will be at mag -1.9. Both objects will lie in the constellation Gemini.

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 pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

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

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 07h38m30s 20°22'N Gemini -4.1 15"6
Jupiter 07h39m00s 21°35'N Gemini -1.9 32"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 40° from the Sun, which is in Leo at this time of year.

The sky on 11 Jul 2026

The sky on 11 July 2026
Sunrise
05:46
Sunset
20:05
Twilight ends
21:47
Twilight begins
04:04


Waning Crescent

5%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:10 13:01 19:52
Venus 09:14 15:50 22:26
Moon 02:35 10:08 17:45
Mars 02:56 10:02 17:07
Jupiter 06:50 13:51 20:51
Saturn 00:18 06:30 12:42
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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